Submitting Chessbot to the Slack App Directory

This is the follow-up post on building a chessbot for Slack.

The main focus on the previous segment was on technical engineering: authentication, request handling, image rendering, and chess rules. However, when submitting an app to the Slack App Directory, one has to take a step back and consider the entirety of the app from the user’s perspective.

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Building a Chess bot for Slack

With Atlassian’s announcement suspending development of Stride and dropping support for Hipchat in favor of Slack, I decided that the time was right to learn and experiment with Slack integrations. Any time I take on learning some new technology, I always make a project that utilizes much of the features of that technology. The project needs to be small enough that I can complete it relatively quickly, but deep enough to flex the technology I am learning. Continue reading

Design for Success

This year, I gave a talk at Syntaxcon in Charleston, SC. Being my first talk on design, I was out of my comfort zone, however I would be remise if I didn’t speak my mind on the subject. The over-arching theme was to get other engineers out of their comfort zones as well and to get involved in the design process.

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