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Slack

Basics

  • We use Slack for chatting with the team – whether as a whole, in smaller groups, or one on one.
  • Ensure your status is set to "available" in Slack when online and free to chat, and "away" when not.
  • Consider getting the Slack desktop app - either the native OS X / Windows one, or the Chrome app, which you can set up to run as a standalone app on system start up.
  • Make sure to add a photo of yourself for your Slack avatar

Channels

  • Slack organizes communication into channels. A channel can be public, so that everyone can join, or private, so that messages are shared with only select individuals. Most project channels are private by default.
  • We default to open, so when in doubt, message the group in a public channel instead of a direct message, or one-on-one.
  • There are a wide variety of different channels you can join, from work-related to topic-related.
  • Mandatory channels include: General, Announcements, How We Work, your Pod, your project channels, your domain area channels (Engineering, UX, PM, etc).
  • Optional channels: You are welcome to poke around Slack and join any open channels that you would like to (#pets, #gardening, #parenting, #sotd, #books, etc) - go to the "Channel Browser" and look around!
  • The Announcements channel is for announcements only. All replies or conversation regarding announcements can transpire in the General channel. Keeping announcements chatter to a minimum ensures that anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the General or other channels will be able to quickly locate important or not-to-be-missed information.

Notifications

  • To notify someone in particular, type @name with your message.
  • If you want to call attention to everyone subscribed to channel, write @channel or @group.
  • To alert only those in a channel/group who are online, write @here.

Tips

  • Did you know you can request support using Slack?
  • Consider using the word "ping" to check on the availability of someone
  • Create a Zoom from Slack: type /zoom (will need to authorize)
  • Create a Google Meet from Slack: type /hangout (will need to authorize the slack app in Meet/Hangout too)
  • You can adjust notification preferences: Slack Notifications
  • Wrap your text in single asterisks for bold, underscores for italics, grave accents for code, and start the line with a > sign to make it a block quote. Formatting in Slack is similar to Markdown.Formatting in Slack
  • To wrap single line output, use one pair of backticks ( Your code here). For multiple lines, wrap with three backticks (Your code here. Some more code.). Wrapping code

Further Reading


This page was last updated on February 10, 2023.