Looking at the Bright Side of Messaging Tools

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season. We're looking at the bright side of things. We're taking these daily things that we run into, tasks, chores, and tools, ones that we may occasionally complain about, and we're going to look at the bright side, trying to keep ourselves on the happy side of any given day. Today we're going to talk about messaging tools. For example, Slack or Microsoft Teams, if you're using that. These were message tools. It was Facebook Messenger and Microsoft Messenger at one point. And then there's a bunch of other discussion type things out there. Yahoo had theirs. There were a bunch of different ones. Back in the day, as they say, I'm not sure how often they're used these days because Slack has become, and Microsoft Teams, those two have really become the, I think, the de standard for inter-office communication electronically. And you may think maybe there's not downsides. Really, it's just as everything is when we connect, when we're so connected to people, it's just sometimes very hard to focus. It's easy to have distractions. Sometimes the conversations are a little bit disjointed. Sometimes there's multiple people that get involved. And so it becomes essentially a cacophony and it becomes very hard to follow. But we're going to focus on the positives today. The first, and probably I think this is the most valuable aspect of these tools, is that you have the ability to, at the drop of a hat or faster, ask a question to communicate with thought, to lean on somebody for help. It is literally almost faster and sometimes easier to whip off a little Slack question than it would be to poke your head over a cubicle wall or walk down the hall to an office to talk to a coworker or walk around the corner to talk to them. Or even if you're in a bullpen area, probably faster to write something in Slack than it is to scoot your chair over and ask them to desk down. There's a real fast way to be able to get some help, to almost have the equivalent of like a pair programming or something like that, have somebody right there with you. You fire off a question. Now granted, they may not immediately respond, but it's a quick way for you to, it's just an incredibly easy way for you to reach out for help. It almost makes it inexcusable to sit there and spend a lot of time working on, struggling through an issue when you could potentially have somebody else help you out, maybe throw some suggestions at you or anything like that. With that, this expands our in-office community as well. Obviously, you've got businesses and specific, more or less private kinds of Slack where the channels are, maybe it's just your team or your department. But then you've also got the bigger ones. You've got, for example, with Develop an Order, we've got a Slack channel that people are free to throw stuff out into there. You may have some of these others, and there's lots and lots of them out there that are Slack that you can sign up to. They are user groups. They are vendor, public-facing Slack channels, support channels. It's easier to me, it's easier to use this than it would be to jump on a site and do the live chat tools that we see these days. Of course, the other thing is a lot of these live chat things, you're not really sure if it's a human or is it a robot? Is it some sort of a chat bot on the other end? Slack, for the most part, you don't have to worry about it. Now, there are bots within Slack and things that it does, but it does make it very easy for you to communicate with others. Especially if you've got the desktop app, you can just leave it up. You're going to see other people. You can get set warnings and alerts. You'll know when other people have pinged you or mentioned you. You can easily just flip over to that and type a question into it. I'm sure there's integrated clients for a lot of IDEs and things like that. I haven't actually explored that too much, but I would bet that those things are out there. You can just sit near, you can be very focused in your development environment. If you have a question, just pop it up and you're off and running. Other positive to Slack, particularly whether you've got a small amount of transactions, of interactions in your communications, or if you've got the paid version, the small amount is less than, I think it's 10,000. Once you go beyond 10,000, then Slack starts to essentially age stuff out of your channels. If you've got the paid version, it's unlimited. The nice thing about this is that you have an easy to search way to go back through conversations. We use this again. Developer Noor is a good example. We use this a lot. We have items that are suggested. We have our nuggets of every mentor meeting where we have something we've run into, maybe a tool or a site that we recommend. After doing that for a few years, we've literally got hundreds of things that we've discussed, that we've talked about. There's sometimes somebody will say, hey, have we talked about this before? Whether that stops us from talking about it in that mentor meeting or not, sometimes it's interesting to go back and say, wow, we never have actually talked about that tool. Maybe like Slack itself or maybe Eclipse or something that we would most likely, Microsoft Teams, things that we probably have run into and use all the time. Sometimes it just hasn't shown up as a nugget. It hasn't been something we've talked about, maybe because it's just so pervasive we don't even consider it worthy of that discussion. One, to see void repeats and things like that. But two, it's a great way to go back and say, oh, I remember us talking about, let's say, CRM apps at some point. I remember we had a couple of those that we talked about. Well, you can go searching for it. Sometimes it's a little difficult to search if you don't know exactly what you're searching for, but we can find some stuff there. A lot of times it's been things like, hey, what was the name of that tool that did X? Go back there and start doing some search. You'll find it. This is really valuable if you are doing kinds of ongoing conversations within Slack, the kinds of things where maybe somebody gave you maybe a login credentials, like a password or a username. Maybe they gave you some IP addresses or server names. Maybe they gave you a specific URL to log in or to view a demo site. There's all kinds of things like that that technically should exist maybe on a wiki page or documentation somewhere. But there's the times that those just show up. It's just part of a conversation. It's easier to go back and either scroll through your history or go do some proper search and go figure out exactly where that information was laid. Also you can pin. So you can have stuff that on a given channel is pinned to that and you can go push those kinds of comments where it's like, hey, this is something everybody should know and they'll probably refer to it on a regular basis. Well, you can go pin that off. You can also do, although it's a little different at that point, you can do live conversations. a phone call through Slack and go talk to people. And now I'm drifting, I see a little bit more into the Slack features, but let's keep it general. So our positives one is that you've got a way to search your past conversations. It's not quite like email because it's a lot faster and by nature it's built more for conversations where email we talked about is more for, I guess, more formal conversations. Slack is in teams and all these tools are for more casual conversations, yet you still have the ability to go back and see what you said, which is very important. Big value when you think you're having a casual conversation and the next thing you know, we've discussed some details that you really need to keep track of or review or maybe somebody mentioned something that's maybe in passing and you're like, oh, I really need to look into that more. I need to understand more about that. These tools allow you to do it. Now you can do that with text, regular texting. It's just that these tools are built a little bit more. Usually, I'm not sure that there's that many text clients that have like really good search functionality and things like that. Those you usually just have to scroll back through stuff. These are text plus. These are taking it to the next level, allowing you to have that written log of your conversations and actually be able to work within it, to search it, to pin it, to save it, to copy and paste it and do what you need to with it. Now the other thing is the annoyance at times is the ping or the notification that you've got something. Somebody wants to talk to you right when you're in the middle of doing something. Now most of these do allow you to have a sleep or away from my desk or silencing or something like that, busy kind of status. I highly recommend you use that if you're in an environment where you have a, we'll call it a lively channel or group doing these discussions. It can be very distracting. However, when you're not in a situation where you need to be heads down and focused, it's great because while it's almost an instant kind of thing, it's the idea of somebody at any point could come up to your desk and say, hey, I've got this question. It also, because of its nature, allows you to ignore it for a few minutes or however long you need to. This is whether you turn that, you go to pause mode or busy mode or whatever, or you're just completing a thought. You'll see something, oh, notification, this thing popped up. That's okay, I'm going to complete my thought. Then you can go back and then you can pick it up. While it does allow us to have conversations that are essentially instantaneous, it also allows us a little bit of time to slow it down and finish our thoughts. It does also allow us to avoid, I will say talking over each other. It does it because of its nature. It doesn't force us to, but it almost forces us to be a little slower in our conversations. It's really more likely in most cases that you're going to actually pay attention to what the other person says. You're going to read it and think about it and then respond. A lot of times when we're talking, one of the problems in a spoken conversation is that we're listening to them, but we're not. We're really forming our response and not paying attention to what they're saying. These tools actually, they don't completely force you to be a better listener, but they should help you be a better listener. It allows you, I think, to see mistakes when you're not a good listener because you're going to see that they'll say A, B, C, D. They go through and say some stuff and you see that and you're doing some responses. Maybe at some point they're like, wait a minute, I just told you that. You can look back and you're like, oh my gosh, they did tell me that. I wasn't paying enough attention. I was too focused on this other thing. These tools, while they're not necessarily, it's not about listening, they may teach you some skills that you can translate maybe over until you're listening and help you understand that your particular view of a conversation or what you take away from a conversation is not always what the conversation was about. I don't mean you as in blaming it, it's like all of us do this. We have our biases. We have our focus in any given situation and that can distract us. That can turn us away from the details that we really should be listening to or that we need to pay attention to. I don't think, I think most of us are not as good at capturing everything in a conversation as we think we are. These kinds of tools help us see where our weaknesses are and maybe make us better at communication in general. I mentioned the bullpen approach to software development where you've got whatever it is, a couple of a few several desks in an area where they more or less either share the people that are there, the staff that are there, either share some big desks or they've got Maybe they work back to back or side to side. Since you have a, even though you're individually working, you have a feeling that you've got a group right there with you. That is one of the most valuable things in working in an office in a development team, I have found. That was my early years. I got so much out of those situations because it's easy to lean back and talk to somebody to learn. You get a lot of stuff by osmosis as you hear other conversations going on around you. This is particularly valuable when you're early in your career. For example, I was in a group where I was mostly doing like install code and stuff like that, scripts and a little bit of programming here and there. In my area, there were a couple of database specialist type guys that were constantly had conversations. There were a couple of user interface guys. There's a couple of guys that were dealing with internationalization problems and just listening their conversations. Every once in a while, I think I was able to maybe contribute a little, but mostly it was more about me being able to just absorb listening to these people and the situations they ran into and what are their challenges and to really understand these other areas of software development that otherwise I'm not sure that I would have had. At least at that point, I would have had zero exposure to. That did help me as I went down the road because I could reflect back on some of those things and go, oh yeah, I remember them saying that they ran into an issue with this. These tools allow us to essentially have that because if you've got a lot of these channels, unless it's just a, you may have two people in a channel, okay, then it's just a conversation. If you've got your entire development team sitting on a channel, there may be a lot of conversations that go on in there that really you're not directly involved. Yeah, you may have an opinion or something you throw out here or there, but for the most part you can just see these conversations going on and you can't ignore them, but also you can just sort of read through them and see if there's anything you can learn from them. So it allows us, even when we're remote, even when we're in virtual teams, to get at least some of the benefits of being in a team. These tools can be, like I said, they can be a little distracting, but so can being in a bullpen situation. You can have people having a conversation behind you when you really need to focus in it. Now granted, some situation in a bullpen, you could always put on headphones or something like that. You can always turn off conversations in these discussion tools. And that brings us to the challenge of the week. When was the last time you took a look at what is out there? As far as, and this is like a 1A and 1B again. One as far as tools, because everybody I think has heard of Slack and Microsoft Teams, maybe there's something else out there that makes sense to you. Hip chat or some of those kinds of things. And then the B is, do you have a group, we'll call it your tribe, that you have a channel with? Is there a group that you can, whether it's a user group or a technical group or maybe just a special interest group or something like that, that you can sort of listen in to the conversations and have an opportunity to learn and expand your horizons? If not, maybe you want to check out some of that stuff. Maybe there's a local user group or maybe a national or international user group that it would make sense, it would be helpful you think to maybe sort of listen in for a while. Turn that thing on and see if it's, sit in the channel for a while and see if you find some useful information or maybe it's too much. Maybe there's too much going on and you say, okay, I'll pass. I'll move on to something else. But I think it's worth it. It's worth it to take a look at it because you never know when you may stumble across a gem for yourself. And that being said, I hope you go out there and have yourself a gem of a day. Have a great day, a great week, and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together.