#techlondon

Top 10 Things To Do Before and After #SMR9

Over the last few weeks we joined forces with the team at Adzuna to find out where all the startup jobs are in the UK. To do this, Duedil and Adzuna identified startups across the country to discover what regions and cities had the most vacancies and what skills they were looking for in their next employees.

MakeScreenshots

The more you bring the tools you already use into Slack, the more powerful Slack becomes (kind of like Voltron). With more than 80 integrated services (and counting!) that’s a whole lot of power. But which tools should you integrate, and why?

This is the start of our series on integrations with one of the quickest and most powerful options: integrating Twitter mentions into a Slack channel in just a few clicks.

How does this help my team?

Many companies use Twitter as a one-way broadcast of corporate news, while your customers may prefer to get support or request features. In other words, they want have a conversation on social media. 

Using Slack to track every Twitter mention of your company’s @username is a good way to gain insight into how (and how often) customers talk to and about your company. It also means your team can talks about the best way to answer a tweet in your Slack channels before they “tag in” to answer publicly on Twitter.

Twitter integration is a powerful tool for your company and the setup process takes just a couple of minutes to complete, which we’ll walk through below.

Over the last month I’ve joined some exciting new Slack communities. I’m inspired by people coming together to discuss common interests, and using existing technologies to organise and create.

Slack is a service for team communication. The company is going from strength to strength, and is being used by a ton of startups to replace Skype, email and other internal communication tools. But more recently, people are starting to use the platform to host communities such as #startup, #nomads, #techlondon and #music. It turns out that though this wasn’t the intended use case, it works really well and the communities are growing quickly.

Most communities that I have come across are using Typeform to allow users to apply, and then manually inviting users to the Slack groups. @levelsio wrote a great article on how he managed to hack Slack into a community platform by discovering an undocumented API endpoint, and automating the invite process for #nomads. I was speaking with the admin teams from #techlondon and #music, and they were interested in doing something similar so I decided to take a look at @levelsio's work and create a Parse Cloud Code module to automate sign ups for them.

If you’re not familiar with Parse, check it out, it’s awesome. I used to use PHP and MySQL for my backends, but it took time to set up and wasn’t always reliable. Parse has solved this problem for me, and recently I’ve been working more with Cloud Code to automate daily reports on the performance of my apps, and scrape news articles for Smile. So, for anyone interested in a Slack and Typeform integration for Parse, here you go!

The Parse docs are very thorough, and I don’t think it would be too difficult for a user with no technical knowledge to set up a new account and begin running Cloud jobs. I’m interested in developing this module to the point that anyone can set it up and get started with auto invites, as I think the Slack community movement is important and there shouldn’t be a barrier to entry. So go through the repository and please get in touch if ther are any issues as I’d be happy to help, and I’d like to know what I can do to clarify the process.

@jonbstrong and I are considering organising a Slackathon in London to get devs together who are interested in building tools to help Slack communities grow. Please join #techlondon if you’re interested in participating!

This is the theme a lot of us use here at Tumblr. For when you miss your Dashboard but you still need to talk to your coworkers.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world sign into Slack from a web browser on Windows. Each of them is (we imagine) yearning for something more. More than 30% of our users run Windows, and their disappointment in the lack of desktop app has been noted. Today, we provide our answer:

Slack for Windows is available for download right here, right now

Step 1. Don’t discriminate on age, gender. These are illegal in the UK. Be careful about the working time directives too.

Slack is a tool for team communication that have been growing rapidly this year. Quite a few appear.in users have requested a way to quickly escalate the conversation from a Slack channel to an appear.in room.