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My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple year

My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs. What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.

andypants 14y ago
That sounds like such an awesome setup!
narag 14y ago
A long time ago, at work, I wrote a mIRC plugin to display incoming messages from a bot on a separate stay-on-top window. IRC has indeed a lot of business applications.
merlincorey 14y ago
At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.
chipsy 14y ago
I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message. Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
- hnriot 14y ago
  I don't agree that email is heavy at all. I see nothing here that couldn't be accomplished with email and/or a wiki. Sharing links over irc makes little sense, links belong on a wiki so they can be searched for and edited etc etc.
  - joezydeco 14y ago
    But that's the appeal of IRC, the protocol is simple and it's easy to write tools that plugin and work with the stream. In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    You would be hard pressed to find anybody using IRC who doesn't also use email and wikis. Once you add IRC to your toolbelt, those things, as if by magic, stop appearing to be the best tool for every job. Actually, it works that way with most tools I find.
- adrr 14y ago
  Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
  - viraptor 14y ago

andypants 14y ago

That sounds like such an awesome setup!

narag 14y ago

A long time ago, at work, I wrote a mIRC plugin to display incoming messages from a bot on a separate stay-on-top window. IRC has indeed a lot of business applications.

merlincorey 14y ago

At another small startup, I setup an IRC server when I was told they were using Bonjour before I got there. It started out very similarly for us -- just a place to chat with the other developers and ops people and share some links. Over time, several IRC bots were created doing real work for the company; most importantly while I was there, the deploy robot would cut a release from revision control for the particular project being deployed and deploy where it was told (or even revert to a previous release if necessary), only listening to people based on their umasks (everyone had their own hostnames with properly setup RDNS too, but that was another matter)... Worked quite well! Can't say if it still does, or not, as I am no longer there.

chipsy 14y ago

I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message. Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.

hnriot 14y ago
I don't agree that email is heavy at all. I see nothing here that couldn't be accomplished with email and/or a wiki. Sharing links over irc makes little sense, links belong on a wiki so they can be searched for and edited etc etc.
- joezydeco 14y ago
  But that's the appeal of IRC, the protocol is simple and it's easy to write tools that plugin and work with the stream. In the case of links, a little bit of Python and the phenny framework let me write a bot that scraped links and post them to a private Twitter feed. That's a lot more flexible than a wiki for my purposes.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  You would be hard pressed to find anybody using IRC who doesn't also use email and wikis. Once you add IRC to your toolbelt, those things, as if by magic, stop appearing to be the best tool for every job. Actually, it works that way with most tools I find.
adrr 14y ago
Checkout HipChat. Like IRC and has a desktop and web client. They also have API which you can use to post messages to channels from external sources. We have our Capistrano/Ant scripts post their status to our "Deployment" channel. Currently working on a bot that hooks into Jenkins so we can build via our "development" channel.
- viraptor 14y ago