The team communication & chat messenger Slack is probably one of the hottest companies in the tech industry right now. It saw some incredible growth, followed by a 2.8 billion valuation.
We, at Usersnap, are great fans of Slack since its inception. We use it with a broad variety of integrations, notably to collect customer feedback. Slack is probably the tool we spent most of our time with. Whether it’s for developing new product features, working on new landing pages or drafting new mockups. Slack plays an important role in every step.
And here are 14 things you might not know about Slack & I found quite helpful for our daily life. And it might help others too while working on their web projects. Check out how to use Slack for web development projects and teams.
Create & share Code snippets
Did you know that you can share code snippets directly inside Slack? Working on web projects sometimes requires exchanging code with colleagues.
Slack offers you a great way to share your code snippet within any slack channel or private slack chats.
You can select between different types – such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and a lot more programming languages.
And there’s even a keyboard shortcut for that: Shift + ⌘ + V (Mac) or Shift + Ctrl + V (PC) will open a pop-up window for creating a new Snippet in Slack.
Get notified on new bugs and change requests from customers
Slack does a great job making web projects less painful. Did you know that you can receive bug reports, change requests or any new idea from your customer directly inside Slack?
By integrating Slack with a bug tracker, like Usersnap, you get notified on any new bug report or feedback from your customers & website visitors.
Besides Usersnap, Slack can be connected with the following bug trackers:
- JIRA
- Pivotal Tracker
- Bugsnag
- trac
GitHub integration with Slack
GitHub is a great library of source codes. GitHub allows you to collaborate, create, edit and review code for your projects. By connecting GitHub with Slack you’ll receive updates to your Slack channel for:
- Commits
- Pull requests
- Issues
A full guide for setting up GitHub with Slack can be found here.
Receive project updates inside Slack
Working on a variety of web projects, you probably manage your tasks with a project management tool – like Trello or Blossom. Slack integrates well with those project management tools.
By integrating Slack with Blossom, for example, you’ll receive notification on any project update in your slack channel. This is a super-easy way to keep all of your team members up-to-date.
More information can be found on blossom’s integration page for slack. Alternatively to Blossom, Asana, Trello or Basecamp offer great Slack integrations as well.
Continuous integration inside Slack
Are you making use of continuous integration services like Codeship, Jenkins CI or Circle CI? By integrating those services with Slack you stay on top of what is happening during your development process inside your Slack channel.
(source: https://blog.codeship.com/codeship-slack/)
Available integrations for continuous integration:
- Codeship
- Travis CI
- Jenkins CI
- Magnum CI
Performance monitoring inside Slack
Many distributed development teams rely on Slack. By integrating your performance monitoring service (e.g. New Relic) with Slack, you can keep your DevOps updated by sending alerts to Slack which are triggered in New Relic (or any other monitoring service).
See the guide for setting up New Relic with Slack.
Subversion & slack
We also use Subversion and Slack and integrated both of them. With the great Subversion integration for Slack, we keep our developers up-to-date on new activities. Everything inside Slack.
Slack shortcuts
Are you using keyboard shortcuts for all kind of applications? Here’s the good news. Slack offers some awesome keyboard shortcuts which makes life easier.
- Simple copy / paste any file into your private Slack chat or channel with ⌘ + C and ⌘ + V (Mac) orCtrl + C and Ctrl + V (PC)
- Get a list of all Shortcuts in Slack with ⌘ + / (Mac) or Ctrl + / (PC)
- Press “Esc” for marking all messages in the current channel as read
A full list of shortcuts can be found here.
Sharing files with Google Drive or Dropbox
By integrating Google Drive (or Dropbox) with Slack, file sharing with colleagues becomes way easier. It’s probably one of the most popular integration for Slack. By simply pasting the Google Drive link in your Slack chat, you’ll get a preview of the file – instead of a simple link.
Customer support inside Slack
If you’re using a customer support tool like Help Scout, Intercom, Zendesk, or Desk.com, there’s some fantastic news. Connect Slack with your existing customer support tool and be notified on any new support request from your clients. You can even search for tickets inside your Slack channel.
Keep your tasks in one place
If you’re using a to-do app or task tracker like Wunderlist, you can make your personal workflow way faster, by integrating your to-do app with Slack.
Adding the Wunderlist integration will post updates to a slack channel of your choice whenever one of your tasks is updated. You can also add new tasks inside Slack with Wunderlist slash commands.
Connect Slack over IRC and XMPP
Prefer to chat with another chat messenger? No problem. You can connect Slack over an IRC and XMPP gateway with another 3rd party messaging client.
See the guide for connecting Slack over IRC and XMPP.
HuBot your chat robot
HuBot is scriptable chat robot developed by GitHub which can be integrated with your Slack channels. There are various ways to make use of HuBot. You can for example program your HuBot to post the top X articles from Hacker News in one of your Slack channels.
Or you can be notified when a VIP client creates a ticket. Or you can do fun things too. I especially like the suggestions from Sitepoint:
(see: https://hubot.github.com/)
Much more with Zapier for Slack
Besides the mentioned integrations and tips, there are much more things to do with Slack. Especially by using Zapier with Slack offers you more than 40 ways to get more out of Slack.
See the full list of integration possibilities here: https://zapier.com/blog/slack-integrations/
That’s a lot
Writing this blog post I actually explored many of the used integrations in more detail. I know this is quite some number of integrations which we are using. You might find one or another helpful for your web team.
Let me know in the comments about your favorite Slack integrations!
This article was brought to you by Usersnap – a visual feedback & bug tracking tool for every web project. Used by software companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
PS: Also make sure to check out our blog post on how to manage project communication with Slack.
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