Notifications and Beyond: An Introduction to the Slack API

We live in an exciting time for software where thousands of vendors make competitive tools tailored for a variety of unique business needs. These tools help us do our jobs, but often come at a price; they don't always play nice with each other. Slack is a team-communication tool that acts as a workspace for discussion and collaboration. The Slack platform connects the tools and software you use into this collaborative workspace. As a developer, building software on Slack's platform and listing it on our App Directory present an opportunity for your company to join Slack's mission to make the work lives of your customers simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. I'll give you an overview of the variety of APIs and developer building blocks the Slack Platform provides to help you integrate your products directly with Slack. Building blocks like incoming webhooks, slash commands, events, and bot users allow developers to create applications that range from simple notifications to complex conversational AI. In this talk we'll use a medley of real-world app examples, walk through an introduction to building applications using Slack's APIs, and get our feet wet with a live-coding demonstration of an in-Slack notification of an external service using an incoming webhook.

Transcript

1. The Slack Platform: Notifications and beyond Roo Harrigan Engineer at Slack @roo_harrigan
2. How to stop slipping notes under thousands of doors and start communicating like a team.
6. A two-hour time block realistically equates to one-hour of productive work. Making real progress on thoughtful work requires more than a 30-minute increment of time. It takes 15 minutes to return to a productive state after an interruption.
7. What can you do with the Slack Platform? Single-team App
8. Slack App Directory
9. But what to build?
10. Slash Command
12. Bot Users. So bot right now.
13. Notifications Today we’ll make one of these!
15. Envoy App alex@gmail.com
16. Server Flow Slack Envoy Notification This is the webhook.
17. Let’s Do this
18. You too can build on Slack! Learn what’s possible at api.slack.com Chat with us on twitter @SlackAPI Roo Harrigan Engineer at Slack @roo_harrigan
19. Thank you!