Slack

With few exceptions, all communication takes place on Slack. From discussing technical issues to Weekly All-Hands meetings, communicating on Slack allows for a distributed remote team to work together across time zones.

Channel Setup

All channels set up for engineering purposes should be prefixed with the engineering- prefix to quickly denote their purpose to serve in the interest of facilitating engineering related communication.

The following channels can be set up in Slack for the engineering team:

• #engineering

• #engineering-backend

• #engineering-bugs

• #engineering-errors

• #engineering-notice

• #engineering-org

• #engineering-prs

• #engineering-qa

• #engineering-random

A brief description of the Slack channels are:

#engineering

General purpose channel for team wide collaboration, communication, and meetings

#engineering-backend

Group discussion of back-end work

#engineering-bugs

Manual reporting of urgent bugs to the engineering team that should be handled immediately

#engineering-errors

Automatic error reporting

#engineering-notice

App integrations around the status of tickets and deployments

#engineering-org

App integrations around the health of the site and related services

#engineering-prs

A channel to post pull requests, and quickly communicate about those PRs in a thread

#engineering-qa

General purpose channel for communicating about anything QA related

#engineering-random

Discuss anything, with a focus on engineering related topics

User Setup

Every engineer needs to be set up as a Multi-Channel Guest and invited into the channels as stated in the Onboarding section

Bot / App Integrations

Better Uptime

• posts to #engineering-org and #engineering-backend when ever there is an API server error, and when that error is resolved

Netlify

• posts to #engineering-notice when a calculus-static deployment to production is completed

Outlier API Error

• posts to #engineering-errors when an error is thrown from outlier-api, showing the results of that error

Standuply

• messages individual engineers, asking for them to fill out their daily and weekly stand-up
• posts to #engineering the results of the daily and weekly stand-ups

Travis CI

• posts to #engineering-notice when a outlier-api build is completed

ZenHub

• posts to #engineering, reminding the team important info regarding tickets that need to be reviewed and /or QAed at 12 AM, 3:00 AM, 12:00 PM, and 3:00 PM, PST
• posts to #engineering-notice when tickets change swim lanes