6 articles by Ross.
The start of any internship brings a wide range of emotions, from excitement to nervousness. After months of anticipating our first day at Slack, reality sunk in that this summer would be extremely different from any other. Due to the pandemic, our entire experience would be virtual. As the two interns for the Product Security…
A fact of life for building an internet service is that, sooner or later, bad actors are going to come along and try to abuse the system. Slack is no exception — spammers try to use our invite function as a way to send out spam emails. Having built up the infrastructure to easily deploy…
This story speaks to the process behind incident response at Slack and uses the May 12th, 2020 outage as an example. For a deeper technical review of the same outage, read Laura Nolan’s post, “A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack” Slack is a critical tool for millions of people, so it’s natural when…
This story describes the technical details of the problems that caused the Slack downtime on May 12th, 2020. To learn more about the process behind incident response for same outage, read Ryan Katkov’s post, “All Hands on Deck”. On May 12, 2020, Slack had our first significant outage in a long time. We published a summary…
Batten down the hatches! The app sandbox is now enabled for all web content. This is a fancy way of saying we’ve dialed up the security of the app. It wasn’t unsafe before, but it’s double safe now. What is the “app sandbox,” what is it protecting against, and why does it matter? This post…
At Slack, Quality is a shared responsibility. The Quality Engineering team is focused on creating a culture of testing, increasing test coverage, and helping the company ship high-quality features faster. We encourage all our developers to write and own end-to-end (E2E) tests. In turn, Quality Engineering (QE) is responsible for the frameworks used and provides…