14 ms·
How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoOh, I thought this was going to be something about Spolsky's old StackOverflow.com. It's just a blog about doing slack chats.
- dang 2y agoWe've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Slack Overflow".
- anotherhue 2y agoI wanted this to be an auto generated stack overflow from slack lurking.
- ndneighbor 2y agoTechnically with the data flow we have, that is now possible :think: Hypothesizing aside, there are some interesting options out there like Tightknit and (for Discord) AnswerOverflow. I still think that Slack makes it way too hard to spin up and start up a community- I think there are many Slacks like the CNCF's one that would be nice as a browsable index of content. As such, Railway's been investing in our own forums for this reason http://help.railway.com/ http://help.railway.com/ because we've noticed the decline of forum culture - and we want to bring it back. (Async, well thought out responses) Maybe this is the next step of that integration!
- withinboredom 2y agoWe used "Unblocked" on our documentation + slack. It's pretty neat.
- ndneighbor 2y agoOoooo- thanks for sharing. Is this the bot that you are referring to? https://slack.com/marketplace/A044USEAHRV-unblocked https://slack.com/marketplace/A044USEAHRV-unblocked I will try it out and see how it performs.
- ndneighbor 2y agoOh shoot, double surprise, and now from someone who isn't my co-worker who posted this. Developer of the feature here, happy to chat through details of the implementation and general developer GTM watercooler advice for those who are building for developers.
- lbotos 2y agoHow many folks do you have to support your slack channels? I'm counting 4-5 support engineers based on your about page? What are your SLOs for messages? How are you managing missed SLOs?
- ndneighbor 2y agoExcellent questions! Railway has three support engineers who work on tooling + myself if you count me. (I have been more focused on customer migrations and classical sales as of late.) One thing that I think we left out of the blog post which would have been helpful context is in our support tool, we have a queue of emails, Discord threads, forum posts, tickets, and Slack threads. Depending on the customer plan, we have an SLO assigned to the conversation. Enterprise people get a response in 1 hour, Pro in 24, and Hobby is best effort (usually 2-3 days at worst). If we hit any of those timelines, the support on-call (a rotating person who is on the operations/GTM side of the house we call logistics) will get a page on PagerDuty. If the page is missed, it escalates up. We do a on-call rotation for support namely to make sure that we build the empathy for our customers for everyone at Railway while also testing if we built good tools that people know how to use. It's one thing to build something for yourself, a whole other thing to build for others.
- lbotos 2y agoah -- so they aren't "working in slack" that's just how/where the users interface.
- ndneighbor 2y agoYep- key point, we work in Discord. We blogged about that too, https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work https://blog.railway.com/p/how-we-work The blog post is a bit old but the point mostly stands- we try to keep our customers close to us, but lately, we have extolled the virtues of focus work, so we rotate the customer comms baton through our on-call system.
- decasia 2y agoIt's a cool idea that the end users can chat easily with the teams who build the product. (If I got that right, I think that's part of what is offered here.) Where I work, we have several layers in between engineering and the end users and ... while there's a lot to be said for increasing focus and reducing distractions, I think it's also nice to have the unfiltered contact sometimes.
- ndneighbor 2y agoThis was the case at ${lastCo} and it bothered me to no end as PM. My job is literally talking to customers! Why do I need to chat to a relationship manager so that I can talk to my own customer?!? That exact point was my very axe to grind and why I am thankful to work on all sorts of comms. automations at Railway when they let me.
- zoky 2y agoBecause you don’t have people skills! https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
- suzzer99 2y agoAll my customers are internal, but there's still usually a support ticket layer between the developer and the customer. I told all my customers, for the apps I own, just send me an email. No need to go through all that. They're thrilled and 6 years in there's been no issues.
- nixpulvis 2y agoI like email. Just too many damn spam emails.
- ndneighbor 2y agoI agree, the growth marketer trend of nailing users with a marketing mailer every week drives me insane.
- floating-io 2y agoThat gets an instant unsubscribe from me. Sometimes it even works...
- thombles 2y agoIf I never subscribed I always report spam. It only takes very small percentages of recipients to do this for mailer services to start getting agitated about bounce rates.
- eastbound 2y agoDo you ever subscribe to any form of mailing list? Email is not the place where I read content.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kevinsundar 2y agoYep honestly I got so tired of wading through marketing emails that I built a (free) email digest service for updates / changelogs from SaaS tools. https://getchangelog.com https://getchangelog.com
- aashishkapur 2y agocheck out usepylon.com - has customer support w/ native slack integrations
- culi 2y agoI apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?
- gleenn 2y agoMarkdown is a technical, not business tool? Gamers tend to be technical?
- wiseowise 2y ago[flagged]
- pinoy420 2y agoI would love to use discord at work
- culi 2y agoIt would also cost companies a fraction of what Slack costs. And there's a thriving bot community for Discord as well I worked at a startup where our single biggest cost was the Slack bill. It's crazy to me what companies will go through to "seem professional"
- dijksterhuis 2y agoon the free tier discord also has some more useful functionality which, iirc, slack doesn’t have on free tier or has a lot of limits on - free voice/video channels (persistent meeting rooms) - put text/voice channels into categories - RBAC for channel categories, text and voice channels (only engineering role can see engineering stuff) - mute notifications from specific channels or categories probably some more but can’t think of them off the top of my head. straight up, if i were starting something tomorrow, i’d use discord and not slack.
- jlarocco 2y ago
- udev4096 2y agoWhy not use matrix instead?
- ndneighbor 2y agoI have been following Matrix development for sometime and I do like the direction where they are going at. However, a lot of my time is trying to reach companies where they are and the majority of them are in Slack. I think there is a case to be made where more companies use Matrix over Discord for their community operations but I think we are seeing a trend of users willing to forego freedoms (as in speech) in exchange for services that are free (as in beer). I think the challenge for protocol developers is to make sure that their client experience is top notch to win and keep those users, something that Mastodon faced vs. the now popular rise of Bluesky. The policy our company practices on whether to support a channel is: we build where our users are. With that said, it's looking like a Teams integration is more likely so I guess we will be learning how to hook into there... (Rip Spectrum chat)
- udev4096 2y agoMatrix itself is extremely solid. The most annoying thing are the clients. Element is the only decent one although it still is far from perfect. As for the freedom vs polished service, it's a no-brainer for any organization because with matrix they have the full control over the data and the service
- defanor 2y ago> It gives us 50x better engagement than email and 8x better response times to customers. Does it mean that it forces the customers to send 50 messages instead of a single mail message? > However, developers hate email. Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group. If anything, I would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight and customizable options. > That context helps Railway Engineers deliver a truly first class support experience. Much of the post reads like a rather annoying advertisement. I was curious why it was a problem to support thousands of customers in the first place, and looks like the issues were in combining conversations over different communication channels, and that a single overloaded person used to create those Slack chats.
- eastbound 2y ago> However, developers hate email If there’s one thing I hate more than email, it’s not being able to mark an item as unread, and put it in a folder to address it later. Slack is synonym of stress. The Slack stress compounds with being pinged all the time, on various topics. It transforms a developer role into a manager role.
- andai 2y agoTangential, but you might want to look into GTD, I've found it very helpful for handling stuff I know I'd forget otherwise. Here's a good intro https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747703
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoI’ve never thought GTD is a good system for programmers. The last thing I want to do is interrupt some important piece of work because an incoming request will only take a couple of minutes.
- 2y ago
- simonkubica 2y agoThis will probably sound like an ad, and is probably not super HN-friendly (given it can be more fun to just hack a custom tool together), but we just use Pylon for this and was surprised OP didn't do the same
- thuanao 2y agoSame thought. Pylon is exactly this but in a polished SaaS app.
- snowe2010 2y agoWell we can’t if we have no clue what pylon is. And searching is absolutely no help because I’m not sure if you’re saying pylon is a replacement for railway, or slack, or some other part of the blog post.
- simonkubica 2y agoMy bad. It's a customer support platform built for/around Slack Connect
- snowe2010 2y agoThank you :)
- joeevans1000 2y agoRegarding various comments here preferring email... let me say that I far, far prefer chat (and the instant notifications!). I would prefer Discord, but I'm just glad it's chat. After saying that, let me share that Railway is incredible and very affordable.
- vincnetas 2y agoI was sold immediately i read sales pitch. But when registering i noticed one curiosity. No VNCs/Virtual desktops. Why is that? If i'm paying for resource usage and i don't see what's illegal about VNC, why is that?
- ndneighbor 2y agoI can qualify this- when we began, we had a tonne of fraud and a lot of students looking to host a VNC to circumvent their school restrictions. Our goal is to be the last cloud a developer has to think about. (More code repo integration vs. give me a machine.) So- when we wrote our fair use policy, we blanket banned VNC use cases. It genuinely sucks that to stop 90 percent of suspicious use cases, you do get legitimate use in that net. For that I apologize. Now since Railway has a better handle on fraud, we feel that we can loosen up the restrictions, so if a customer clarifies their use case, we don't mind. With that said, we don't offer raw VMs (yet) so you will find the platform a bit limiting a bit after our complete migration to self-hosted metal.
- ThinkBeat 2y ago> However, developers hate emai I prefer email. Email is asynchronous, It does not interrupt my flow or my presentations, I can decide when I spend tine responding. Then I can fully focus on the emails and type the response they merit. Of course you have the person sending you an email and 30s later they tap you on the shoulder to ask if you got that email.
- rightbyte 2y agoYe I feel like many times when people complain about email they complain about the emails' content not the concept of sending email, which is then misinterpreted. The more I think about this, the more "don't shoot the messenger" fallacies I see around me. Like, the complaints about overly bureaucratic documentation was interpreted as critique of documentation by "people". Etc.
- aulin 2y agoI prefer email. I'd really prefer if people read what I write though. The big problem with email is people can't read.
- phailhaus 2y agoI Slack is interrupting your presentations, that's on you. You can mute the bell, you can even silence the popups. I've done both and my productivity is way up, now the only notification indicator is the badge.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0xedd 2y ago[dead]
- internet_points 2y agomeh, freenode had 90K users at its peak =P
- gjtorikian 2y agoMy startup yetto.app offers such an integration out of the box. We’re building a support tool that integrates with all sorts of communication platforms (email and Slack, but also GitHub, Jira, Zendesk, Linear, and SMS).
- bigfatkitten 2y ago> However, developers hate email. I don't mind email, but I despise Slack. I miss the olden days of being able to check my email once or twice a day with nobody expecting an immediate response, and being able to focus the rest of the time. Three or four times a year, in response to something genuinely urgent, I might get a phone call.