Top 10 Slack channels for remote working

Daniel Fairhead, Senior Developer here at the Developer Society reflects on how working in a remote tech team can be really lonely and what small ways to connect can make a big difference.

Thankfully, most of us are pretty OK with spending much of the day working alone - and the benefit of not having to commute, and being able to live dispersed around the country are great.

We use Slack for comms - and so have tried to make it a great place to be a distributed community - without being overwhelming. We have separate project channels, a very few compulsory channels for announcements etc - and then many topic-specific fun ones people can optionally join.

Here are my favourite 10:

(no order…)

1. #overheard_team - we have a slack channel we can put the silly or out of context things that we say in meetings here, or random amusing test data or comments we spotted during code review.
   1. “It looks mildly sane - give it a shot”
   2. “Delete this species” - “um maybe we should reword that button? Deleting a whole species sounds pretty drastic”.
   3. “I need to put my tiny sausages somewhere I can find them”
   4. “Does the sun not make you happy?” “No, it’s annoying”.
   5. linty mclint-face - ”Best commit message ever…”
   6. “I need tea to continue the will to live. One moment.”
   7. “Do you know what I heard that’s blowing my mind… Bourbon biscuits are just naked Penguins… never occurred to me before, but now I’m thinking about dipping bourbons in chocolate to see if that’s the case.”
   8. “Sounds nefarious…” “All the best things are”
2. #overheard_partners - comments from our clients & partners. It’s easy for positive feedback to get lost - so when we hear someone really enjoying what we’ve built for them, we’ll often post it here - which means we all get to hear the daily positive vibes of what the team is accomplishing.
3. #buddies - When someone does something awesome or supportive - when a team-mate helps us with a gnarly coding problem, or when you spot something you just want to celebrate.
4. #parents-of-dev - it’s so helpful to natter about stuff our kids are doing, ask for advice about library services or school issues without bothering the rest of the team.
5. #general - a general chat area. People post pictures of cool things from their weekends or holidays, fossils they’ve found (Hi Paul!) or other stuff that’s not necessarily work related.
6. #announcements - where things like hiring announcements, retro board links, etc go.
7. #developer_tips - any time someone learns something new or interesting, or finds a nice helper tool or shortcut, we can just post them here. I’ve learned some really interesting stuff. Also for when I was making an internal training series of short videos, I could post them here.
8. #alumni - people who’ve moved on to other roles outside DEV still want to keep in touch, sometimes share wedding photos or similar. It’s really great having people still want to be part of the community, even though they aren’t (currently!) still employed by DEV.
9. {$name}-cards - we send ecards to the team for birthdays, welcomes, special anniversaries etc. So each person has a private channel they’re not part of - which then their line manager can invite the rest of the team into any time there’s an opportunity to write in a card for them. It seems to work really well!
10. #bugs - whenever any of our sites has a bug, it’s reported via sentry and then the report shows up here with a link to the sentry report. Super convenient for QA.

Of course, it’s not all just slack channels. Every day we have short stand-up calls, and “Let’s hop on a quick call” and work together multiple times a day. Slack has this built-in “huddles” - but we also use google meet a lot. Many many things are just easier to do in a call or face-to-face or with screen-sharing rather than trying to describe a problem in text.

Getting the balance right between “async” messages, notifications and alerts, and urgent help is hard!

What are you doing to make distributed team-work really human-friendly?