Slack Hacks: Tips & Tools for Team Collaboration (Early Release)

e're surrounded with a myriad of communication tools: email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, to name a few. Slack is a newer communication tool, borrowing IRC concepts and transcending them with an intuitive interface that allows countless customizations and integrations—from other communication tools to bots, Kayak, Google, Hacker News, and more. Slack glues together all of your favorite applications, and if there isn't something already available to fit your needs, you can hack your own solution.

This practical book provides you with hacks to use Slack efficiently and adapt it to your company and your community. It discusses Slack integrations, covering both IFTTT and Zapier. Going deeper into Slack customization, the book also shows how you can build your own applications and Slack bots by giving you some examples using different tools and frameworks to hack your custom workflow.

These custom hacks include:

Videoconferencing in your Slack channel
Using Natural Language Processing to search flights
Creating a Hacker News update
Outputting your team's time zones
Creating a slackbot to randomly select people for tasks
Using Heroku to host a poker bot
Dispatching customer support through Slack
Organizing tournaments in your team
Making your bot self aware
Designing a plugin to create polls
Creating xkcd-style charts
Sharing code snippets directly in Slack