DigitalOcean <3 Slack

Channels

We have #announcements to let everyone (>120 people now) know something and #offtopic for company wide discussion about anything. We also have channels for each team + overly specific fun channels + a bunch of fun private groups. Examples:

• We have a #web channel for our web team and a stream of what's happening on some of our repos.

• We have a #seamless channel for finding people to order with.

• We have an #illustration channel for our illustrators and critiques.

• We have a #creative channel (where the creative team works) with a dribbble search engine.

• We have a #pingpong channel where we discuss our ping pong power rankings algorithm.

• We have a #catpix channel.

Communication

Basically all of our communication happens through Slack. I rarely get an email (barring meeting invitations) from people at work.

Instead of starting group email chains, we often create ad-hoc groups for projects and everything goes in there, which is awesome because it then becomes searchable.

Integrations

Integrations are gold. Some stuff we can do:

• We are able to start Google Hangouts directly in a channel.
• We can see mentions of @digitalocean on Twitter the moment they happen.
• We have a channel streaming all of our employees' tweets in one place.
• We have a Dribbble search engine
• We have GitHub streaming commits and merges
• Slack Bot returns my high fives.
• We have a bot that posts random images of squirrels. Because that's important.

Web Hooks

People have built tons of helpful bots that do all sorts of things. They're pretty whimsical and fun, fitting pretty well with Slack.

You can build almost anything with this.

Always Online

This is personal preference, but Slack works perfectly on mobile, so I'm always on it and always available. This is generally less about working all night and more about being tapped in to your company culture. It's a good feeling.