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2022-02-07-github-vs-slack.md

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GitHub vs Slack

Throughout GitHub lore, we have phrases like "everything should have a URL", "if it doesn't have a URL, it didn't happen", or my personal favorite "if you liked it then you should have put a URL on it". While catchy, these bumper stickers fail to fully capture the underlying intention they represent: As one Hubber succinctly wrote a number of years ago, "we write things down".

Not all URLs are created equally

There's a world a difference between "this thing has a URL" and "I wrote this thing down". One way to distinguish the two, is whether the URL serves to canonically represent the idea or merely as a snapshot for one of that idea's many discussions. Slack is a great example of the "this thing has a URL" category. Once you post message, you can link others to it. Like a recording of a meeting (which could also have a URL), it's a line-by-line transcript of everything that was said.

You might hash things out over Slack to determine how to resolve a tricky engineering challenge, but when that feature receives a bug report six months down the line, even though the conversation has a URL, you generally wouldn't update the contemporaneous Slack exploration with a link to the new bug, nor would you normally cross reference the historic thread with the subsequent bug resolution conversation, unless there was context that was necessary to bring in. Culturally, Slack conversations are expected to be both distinct and accurte in the moment, even if the URL lives on longer.

In fact, that's the point. Many may not be aware that Slack is actually a backronym for "Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge". There are many great things to be said about Slack, but the problem it sets out to solve is to render searchable the long-tail of all corporate conversations, not to serve to organize, summarize, or otherwise make sense of organizational process. It's the difference between recording collective stream of consciousness versus ____.

As I wrote:

Giving process a URL forces the moving party to distill their ideas down into written form, to capture the essential elements of their proposal, and to articulate them in the clearest way possible. There’s a reason it’s called “reducing something writing”. It forces you to maximize the signal to noise ratio and focus on what matters.

  • Durability / longevity
  • Discoverability (organization, cross linking, search)
  • Fidelity
  • Recorded stream of conscience vs. distilled thoughts
  • Ability to indicate state
  • Horizon of context (seconds vs. minutes to years)
  • Self censorship
  • Time zones
  • Resumable

Allow readers to opt-in to additional context

  • Here's the decision
  • Showing the work
  • Play-by-play coverage

Be purposeful about the tools you choose

Just as blacksmiths know the value of an anvil, and bakers the value of yeast, so too must knowledge workers embrace the tools of their craft. A composer would never stand for his or her concerto being played on a kazoo. Why then, is content all-too-often created haphazardly, with its presentation and preservation being subject to the whims of organizational habit?