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We’ve been working to bring components of Quip’s technology into Slack with the canvas feature, while also maintaining the stand-alone Quip product. Quip’s backend, which powers both Quip and canvas, is written in Python. This is the story of a tricky bug we encountered last July and the lessons we learned along the way about […]
Networking opportunities abound at SF Tech Week, as they do at any tech gathering. The potential for meaningful connections is tremendous as professionals from around the world convene to discuss the most recent advancements and innovations in tech. However, it can be difficult to find your way around and make the most of the event […]
After a lot of hard work, you’ve landed that coveted internship. Now comes the next big challenge: delivering a meaningful project over the summer. Leading a project independently is an opportunity to sharpen your skills, demonstrate your capabilities, and experience personal growth. As you drive the project on your own, the support from your mentor […]
At Slack, we manage tens of thousands of EC2 instances that host a variety of services, including our Vitess databases, Kubernetes workers, and various components of the Slack application. The majority of these instances run on some version of Ubuntu, while a portion operates on Amazon Linux. With such a vast infrastructure, the critical question […]
Google Analytics is often on a “need to know” basis, but why not flip the script? Paul Scanlon shares how he wrote a GitHub Action that queries Google Analytics to automatically generate and post a top ten page views report to Slack, making it incredibly easy to track page performance and share insights with your […]
“What are your goals for this quarter?” It’s the question every manager asks, and one that often prompts a flurry of technical objectives and project milestones. Jumping into this internship, I knew my answer. I wanted to practice making informed decisions on my project, since that was one of the challenges I faced last summer. […]
All software is built atop a core set of assumptions. As new code is added and new use-cases emerge, software can become unmoored from those assumptions. When this happens, a fundamental tension arises between revisiting those foundational assumptions—which usually entails a lot of work—or trying to support new behavior atop the existing architecture. The latter […]
Slack Data Engineering recently underwent data workload migration from AWS EMR 5 (Spark 2/Hive 2 processing engine) to EMR 6 (Spark 3 processing engine). In this blog, we will share our migration journey, challenges, and the performance gains we observed in the process. This blog aims to assist Data Engineers, Data Infrastructure Engineers, and Product […]
At Slack, we’re committed to security that goes beyond the ordinary. We continuously strive to earn and maintain user trust by safeguarding critical components integral to every user’s experience. From passwords to session cookies, and tokens to webhooks, we prioritize protecting everything essential to how users log into the platform and remain authenticated. Through proactive […]
Slack uses cookies to track session states for users on slack.com and the Slack Desktop app. The ever-present cookie banners have made cookies mainstream, but as a quick refresher, cookies are a little piece of client-side state associated with a website that is sent up to the web server on every request. Websites use this […]