Tag: slack

Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I'd missed is my team's quirky morning ritual.

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Slack screenshot of Dan saying, at 08:57am: 'You know how many people pika-waved at me on a morning while I was on sabbatical? None. None at all. I missed you guys.' The quote is bookended by an animated GIF of Pikachu waving and another of Pikachu dancing around a heart. Five people have reacted with a mixture of Pikachu dances and waves.

Even when it's technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that... but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.

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A filled contact form alongside a Slack message and a resulting ticketing system message.

Good news! It turns out that the new code to fix the mail merge fields in Three Rings doesn't introduce an inconsistency with established behaviour. It was important to check, but it turns out all is well.

I touched bases with a fellow volunteer on Slack. Three Rings volunteers primarily communicate via Slack: it helps us to work asynchronously, which supports the fact that our volunteers all have different schedules and preferences. Some might do a couple of evenings a week, others might do the odd weekend, others still might do an occasional intense solid week of volunteering with us and then nothing for months! A communication model that works both synchronously and asynchronously is really important to make that volunteering model work, and Slack fits the bill.

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Slack screenshot showing a discussion between Dan Q and another volunteer about whether it's reasonable for a volunteer to be able to send another volunteer an email containing private information accessible only to the second volunteer, so long as it's embedded via a merge field and the actual value is never shown to the first volunteer. Ultimately, Dan suggests that we stick to the established behaviour, which turns out after testing to be that volunteers can't send such private information to one another.

We get together in person sometimes, and we meet on Zoom from time to time too, but Slack is king of communication at Three Rings