It’s been a minute since I coded something up with y’all, so when it was time to pick 3 random e-book winners from the #jsparty channel of our Slack, I used it as an opportunity to grab Deno and do just that.

If you missed the news…Salesforce is buying Slack for $28 billion. To be clear, the deal is $27.7 billion in cold hard cash plus Salesforce stock. But who cares about money, amirite? Why does this deal even make sense?

Ina Fried for Axios:

[Salesforce] CEO Marc Benioff characterized the move as a bet that the pandemic-driven shift to remote work isn’t a temporary blip but rather a permanent transformation.

Slack has the lead in its still-nascent space, but was facing a challenge of its own — namely that Microsoft’s rival Teams was bundled into Office subscriptions. As a standalone company, Slack couldn’t easily manage such a move, nor could it afford to get into a price war.

I liked what Aaron Levie (Co-founder and CEO of Box) said about this deal and the future of work:

What’s amazing is that even though the current wave of enterprise software to power the future of work has been going strong for 10+ years, we’re still in the very earliest of stages in this market. The last decade has been about building the tools that power new ways to work from anywhere, collaborate with anyone, and automate workflows and business processes in the cloud. The next decade will be the era when organizations adopt these technologies en masse and transform their enterprises. While many of us in Silicon Valley and similar ecosystems have been using tools like Slack for years now (and even Microsoft Teams, more recently), 90%+ of the world’s digital workers are still not leveraging these modern platforms for the majority of their work. While it’s hard to imagine, we’re still in the early innings of this market.

How to track your Stripe payments from your store or billing integration as they happen using Slack, powered by Python with faasd. Extend to do anything you like such as responding to new customers.

Phelia transforms React components into Slack messages by use of a custom React reconciler. Components (with their internal state and props) are serialized into a custom storage. When a user interacts with a posted message Phelia retrieves the component, re-hydrates it’s state and props, and performs any actions which may result in a new state.

It’s crazy interesting to me how many of these “Use React for X” projects keep popping up. People are making CLIs with React, games with React, desktop apps with React. What else?

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that considers whether an object that has had each of its pieces replaced one-by-one over time is still the same object when all is said and done. If every piece of wood in a ship has been replaced, is it the same ship? If every piece of JavaScript in an app has been replaced, is it the same app? We sure hoped so, because this seemed like the best course of action.

Fascinating look behind the scenes at both the process of rewriting a massively used application and the particular architectural choices made along the way. The approach used was at once incremental and all-encompassing, rewriting a piece at a time into a gradually growing “modern” section of the application that utilized React and Redux. And the results? 50% reduction of memory use and 33% improvement in load time… not too shabby.

Good news fellow Slack users, your productivity just got bumped by the perf gods of Slack thanks to their continued efforts and focus on the desktop app’s performance.

Slack is unveiling a new version of its desktop app for Windows and macOS today that promises big performance improvements. Slack has rebuilt its desktop app to focus on speed, and the company claims Slack will now launch 33 percent faster than before. The Slack app will even use 50 percent less RAM than before, according to the company.

Slack has been working on this overhaul for two years, slowly modernizing parts of its code along the way. While the desktop apps still run on Electron, all of the UI parts have been rebuilt using React to fix some of the shortcomings of the existing Slack app.

Gervasio Marchand lays out all the ways in which Slack’s threads feature is lacking. Then he goes one to describe why his browser extension, Refined, makes threads better.

Now you can easily build, deploy, and distribute Slack apps for free with serverless on ZEIT Now.

We recently built a simple Slack app. The app allows users to type /eval <JavaScript code> directly in Slack that evaluates JavaScript code and prints the output directly in a Slack response. Try it out!

In this blog post, we will show you exactly how we did it. We will demonstrate how you can easily build, deploy and distribute similar Slack apps for free, leveraging the power of serverless on Now.

Does BetterSlack make Slack better?

…there are 2 or 3 things about Slack I think can be made better. That’s why I built BetterSlack. It’s a Chrome extension that injects javascript into your Slack environments to add (or remove) features.

Hide certain users, generate hangout links, move reactions to the right, threads on channel by default, hide status emojis … Gervasio has a 3 minute demo to explain things in more detail…

Looks cool, but mind the disclaimer:

The project is still under alpha, there are lots of things already done, but there is also a lot of work to do! If you want to help, please contact me under marcelocamargo@linuxmail.org or create an issue! Working in community, we can soon have a CLI client as complete as the web one!

Read this for the sidebar management tips alone! Wow, I had no idea how cluttered my sidebar was until I followed Peter’s guidance from this post.

Declutter your sidebar by hiding all channels that don’t contain unread messages and are not starred. You still won’t miss anything, as they pop up if there’s chatter, and you can always use ⌘-T to open the Jump menu. It’s amazing how much better it feels if there aren’t 50 channels you need to scroll through all the time.

This post was extracted from Peter’s talk Effective Remote Communication.

A cross-platform, open source Slack app that’s built for speed?! Shut up and take my money admiration!

Wey is written in Node and the UI is powered by the Yue library, which means it’s not hitchin’ its wagon to Electron. But it does come with a rather large caveat:

Do not use this for work, you might miss important messages due to bugs and missing features.

Depending on how much you like your job, you might consider that more of a feature than a bug. 😉

Honestly, if it can be described as "a #{beloved_service} client for your terminal", I’m gonna log it.