Ian Hoffman

2 articles by Ian Hoffman.

How we built enterprise search to be secure and private

Many don’t know that “Slack” is in fact a backronym—it stands for “Searchable Log of all Communication and Knowledge”. And these days, it’s not just a searchable log: with Slack AI, Slack is now an intelligent log, leveraging the latest in generative AI to securely surface powerful, time-saving insights. We built Slack AI from the…

Ian Hoffman·March 7, 2025AI & ML

Unified Grid: How We Re-Architected Slack for Our Largest Customers

All software is built atop a core set of assumptions. As new code is added and new use-cases emerge, software can become unmoored from those assumptions. When this happens, a fundamental tension arises between revisiting those foundational assumptions—which usually entails a lot of work—or trying to support new behavior atop the existing architecture. The latter…

Ian Hoffman·July 31, 2024Architecture