Slack Hacks: Tips & Tools for Team Collaboration

We’re surrounded with a myriad of communication tools: email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, to name a few. Slack is a newer communication tool, borrowing IRC concepts and transcending them with an intuitive interface that allows countless customizations and integrations—from other communication tools to bots, Kayak, Google, Hacker News, and more. Slack glues together all of your favorite applications, and if there isn’t something already available to fit your needs, you can hack your own solution.

This practical book provides you with hacks to use Slack efficiently and adapt it to your company and your community. It discusses Slack integrations, covering both IFTTT and Zapier. Going deeper into Slack customization, the book also shows how you can build your own applications and Slack bots by giving you some examples using different tools and frameworks to hack your custom workflow.

These custom hacks include:

• Videoconferencing in your Slack channel
• Using Natural Language Processing to search flights
• Creating a Hacker News update
• Outputting your team’s time zones
• Creating a slackbot to randomly select people for tasks
• Using Heroku to host a poker bot
• Dispatching customer support through Slack
• Organizing tournaments in your team
• Making your bot self aware
• Designing a plugin to create polls
• Creating xkcd-style charts
• Sharing code snippets directly in Slack

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Slack Apps and Simple Webhooks
Chapter 3. Slack meets IFTTT and Zapier
Chapter 4. Develop Your Own App
Chapter 5. Slack for Teams
Chapter 6. Creating Chatbots