Full-Stack/Senior Engineer with an emphasis on front-end with a multi-disciplinary background and have worked at small and large scale products and companies.
I'm an ex-Google engineer and interested in small/mid sized companies. Based in NY open to hybrid or remote and available to work immediately.
I'm an ex-Google engineer, Full-Stack Developer/SWE of 7+ yrs with a multi-disciplinary background in design & product management.
Interested in small/mid sized companies for IC, Engineering Manager, or Technical Project Management roles. I have extensive experience with coaching, mentorship, community building and public speaking.
It's a major opportunity for them, for sure. They are still missing some features I find critical, but they really have things figured out with integrated voice/video communications in the app.
The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It was a great way to display enough context, but not make the flow confusing.
Oh my god the absolute worst thing about slack are threads. Can we please not bring them to anything else? how do they provide any value whatsoever other than making it hard to realize someone responded to you?
Personally, big fan of Slack threads. I use them daily in our team chat -- we can talk in the main chat about anything relevant to the whole team, and if someone has a specific comment on someone's message, they reply and create a thread while the rest of the conversation continues on.
The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use threads nearly as well, though -- I do think they take some "correct usage" to perform well.
Personally, I do like the concealed nature of threads within the main conversation, but I do not like how they are presented when opened. The whole "displayed on a narrow pane on the side" seems too cluttered to me. I'd much rather have it expand in the main conversation pane, maybe even create nested threads inside (kind of like reddit/HN).
Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.
I used to think the same thing regarding threads and I think slack's UI for them is bad (pushing them to a side window and squishing the main chat) but I have found them useful a few times recently. Often times a channel will have several different topics going on and the ability to push a conversation into a thread has been useful to avoid cross talk.
As much as I hate to say it, after using all three, I definitely like the Teams threads the best. That model offers the best balance of visibility and organization that I have seen.
I mean, you can't really disable notifications that exist for a feature and then complain that you're not notified when somebody messages you using that feature...
If it's truly async then just close slack until you're ready to talk, then open it back up and go through all of the red badges / white channels.
If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
I have a lot of problems with slack (namely, performance and lack of solid video/audio calling), but threads are fine.
> If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?
Threads are by far the worst part of using Slack. A few coworkers use them, but most do not use them. It causes lots of unnecessary clicking and keeping track of an additional place where conversation is happening.
If it's off-topic, IRC's ancient solution has always been "Take it to #channel-cafe" or whatever, perhaps a topic-specific channel. Just /join it, if it doesn't exist it gets created. Or perhaps have a 1-1. But because this affects everyone, it's easy to make it the culture to not spam irrelevant stuff in the main channel, making it a non-problem that threads could alleviate.
In practice you're going to get violators, but that happens with Slack as well. In part because Slack's thread UI sucks so occasionally you'll wake up and see a couple people in after-hours last night who just didn't care and filled up 50-100 messages on the unthreaded channel, forcing people to skim through it or if they were foolish enough to leave notifications on after-hours to get all these pings.
One nice thing basically all modern chat systems have is easy group chat, so you don't have to create a new room, but rooms are nice too. e.g. any time we had a customer case requiring a few people to look into it, we'd just create a slack channel for it instead of using threads on the team channel. After a while someone would archive the channel.
Then there are people who use threads and occasionally click the "send to whole room" option which really screws up notifications. You're looking at it right there in the main team chat, but you have to open the thread or your notifications to dismiss the notification.
Next time I'm forced to use Slack I'll use Ripcord. You know what UI I miss most and would help Slack/Discord/Element tremendously? Tabs.
Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).
If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.
(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).
My company has a similar size, and we have a self-hosted Mattermost instance. We're switching away because the executives bought into another product but that's a different story, Mattermost works well at that size.
Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.
They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.
In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.
And integrate business twitch streams please, with company email footers always reading ‘don’t forget to sub to my stream’. Let the twisted fantasy play out where the business world lives like esports streamers and wow raiding guilds.
Maybe, though this reminds me of the story where Borland's management decided to move away from the "hacker" style ethos and mainstream audience so that they chase after the "enterprise" businesses and ended up alienating their own engineers, their existing customers and screwing up themselves over the years to the point where they went from being one of the biggest software houses in the computer industry to a little ball that is painted and thrown around owners that operate akin to digital graveyards.
Discord's problem isn't it's name. Discord's entire interface is based around gaming. It shows your running game in the UI, it integrates with Steam, etc. It's loading messages are all based on gaming culture.
It just doesn't present itself as something you'd consider for your business.
The problem with Discord isn't the branding, it's the license. Anything you send in Discord can be used for branding material by Discord. Not good for a business.
Good to know. I have some Discord groups and contacts, but I don't spend a lot of time in it. I actually find the playful messages somewhat endearing, but I feel like they'd be better off launching an entirely separate client if they want to appeal to businesses.
Slack has actual administrator tools unlike Discord. Discord very clearly has no interest in the capturing any significant market share in the business space.
There's a bunch of open source projects using it now as well. I have two separate family Discord servers. Quite a few social ones that aren't specifically gaming focused too.
Discord also caters to small-med non-gaming online communities almost by accident because the kinds of moderation features you'd need are the same as if you were a streamer with an audience.
It's not really about the name or the branding but that fact that Discord's primary market and the driving force behind all their features is gaming communities.
Business, for worse, will demand features catered to their workflow.
Certainly an opportunity for Discord, but I wonder how big of an opportunity. Their target audience is more casual whereas Slack's has shifted to more work/Enterprise-focused. So their audiences don't overlap as much as they used to.
It will be interesting how this impacts Mattermost [1] though - an open source developer collaboration tool for Enterprises, a closer competitor to Slack.
Yeah, you definitely are, especially for larger companies. Just from one example: you can tell when a specific issue requires attention based on how many comments the thread has.
So let's say I wake up in the AM and there's a thread that says "how do I use the API for companyservice.example-api.com" and the thread has 50 comments.
Let's say it's a service I support. First, I know there's an issue because a customer required attention to begin with. This is then confirmed by the fact that the thread has 50 comments in it so there are probably documentation and usability issues with this service.
The company I work for and the services I am responsible for deals with internal customers and we use these two absurdly simple metrics to optimize support regularly.
When we first started with certain services that my team is responsible for, we used Slack metrics A LOT. As in, we had spreadsheets with this data and we'd go over them every week. Nowadays, our services are almost 100% self-service and we rarely, if ever, get pinged on Slack for those services because the documentation is optimized and the usability has been specifically designed so that our engineers don't get in the way of our customer's needs.
I would say they help to scope a part of a discussion that clarifies some detail or maybe when giving a link elsewhere, without derailing the mainline of the discussion.
It's useful when people arrive in the discussion at different times and you don't want to necessarily let the whole channel to be notified about your specific remark, and don't want to write a private message either -- one reason being it would lose the context.
In our project we have multiple channels that have actively 3-5 persons and work at different times. The things we chat about are lightweight changes or news, or maybe someone has a quick clarifying question about implementation detail. Something that wouldn't be posted in an issue for one reason or other.
FWIW, I was also a threads nay-sayer but I've since seen the light
Remember the irc support channels where conversations and problem/solution dialogs were constantly muxed with other conversations / dialogs?
Imagine each question being a root message, and all of the dialog / suggestions / answers being in a thread.
Also makes it super convenient for search.
In addition to that I find that beyond a certain channel / DM count it's a lot easier to follow up on things with threads
Give it a shot, try to get your whole team on board. You can always revert back to not using them later :)
yes! I actually love that format! it's how I grew up!
I'll recognize that I'm a bit of an oddball in that respect nowadays, but it can work, at least with a small enough room. I love having all the conversations cross over one another and just being able to read back and follow them.
Wow really? I'm genuinely surprised. I couldn't imagine using Slack without threads, how do you keep discussions on track for certain topics? At any given time I have 30-40 threads going, which means I can easily track conversations. Without threads I'm just endlessly scrolling, or trying to find something, or god forbid relying on Slack's utterly broken search.
If everyone is bought-in on using them, they can be a really nice way to keep single topics in one place rather than having interleaved conversations in a single channel. If people don't use it 100% of the time, though, it's honestly worse because now you're not always sure where to read/continue a conversation.
There is a non-profit called Defy Ventures[1], that aims to rehabilitate prisoner personnel who are pre-release and equip them with skills and a technical/tactical overview for entrepreneurial-minded prisoners to help them adjust and better reintegrate back into society.
A tool for networked thought that has been an effective "Second Brain" for me.
I'm writing way more than ever through daily notes and the bi-directly linking of notes enables me to build smarter connections between notes and structure my thoughts in a way that helps me take more action and build stronger ideas over time.
I’d recommend you to check out Obsidian [1] from the makers of Dynalist. It’s also a tool made mainly for Zettelkasten, but it is offline and local by default. It’s not an outliner like Roam, but rather a free-form text editor.
I feel that Obsidian’s values align more closely with the values of a general HN reader. For example, the files (Zettels?) are plain markdown files, so the portability is much higher than what is the case with Roam (which is online only, and your data is somewhere in a database in a proprietary format).
Another example would be the support for plugins, which are first-class citizens (although the API is yet undocumented) — many of the core features are implemented as plugins and can be turned off.
And there’s a Discord channel where you can discuss with the devs, which are very responsive — so much so that I’m surprised they can rollout new features so quickly (at least one feature update per week, from my limited experience with Obsidian).
I've had good experiences with personal Wikis before, but have fallen back to plain notes. I think notetaking by itself is immensely powerful and underappreciated in general (wish I had started earlier), and all that's necessary is building a habit out of it. Maybe this can give it a little extra spice (hopefully not as cumbersome as a full blown personal website).
I can recommend this video [1] from the author of How to Take Smart Notes. The whole Zettelkasten is a great idea, and he explained it succinctly in that talk. He also compares the status quo methods of note taking with the Zettelkasten, which for me was very eye-opening
Not sure about the specific features of hypertext, but in general: bi-directional linking, block references (Roam is an outliner like Dynalist or Workflowy), block transclusion, graph view of your page network...
Of course, you could throw a bunch of scripts together to approximate these features — but you don’t have to, since Roam (and Obsidian and others) exists.
I'm moving my blog to GatsbyJs coming from Wordpress and it's been great so far. Significant performance improvements, great plugin ecosystem and utilizes common front-end patterns with less context switching if you have front-end experience using JS/React as opposed to Python, or Go based alternatives.
I utilize a similar system to "reverse engineer the year".
Breaking down the major outcomes I want for the year into quarters which each having a specific focus and theme. At the end of each quarter I have a 90 day review to reflect on how I'm doing, where I'm heading and if there is any recalibration that needs to happen from changing priorities.
Each month I is essentially 3 "Acts" that play out the goals of that quarter and those in turn have weekly sprints.
With all that said the day is the most important of it all. What I choose to do each day reverberates across the year. This is where deep investment in intentionally building habits and focusing on systems over goals come into play.
Willing to relocate: Potentially
Technologies: JavaScript/Typescript, React, NextJS, Node.js, Ramda, Flutter, Java, Python, SQL, Postgres, Redis
Experience: 7+ years
Résumé/CV: https://privnote.com/EMT6WIb9#ainIBZ2x5
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/juvoni
Email: juvonib [at] gmail
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Full-Stack/Senior Engineer with an emphasis on front-end with a multi-disciplinary background and have worked at small and large scale products and companies.
I'm an ex-Google engineer and interested in small/mid sized companies. Based in NY open to hybrid or remote and available to work immediately.