4 articles by Zac Sweers.
Embarking on a journey Stepping out of SFO with the familiarity of the fogginess of the city, my story at Slack unfolds once again. As a return intern, I found myself prepped for another exciting summer, and this opportunity encompassed a renewed sense of anticipation — a mix between known pathways and new adventures. Returning…
We use plenty of open source tools at Slack and we’ve benefited immensely from the wider Android, Kotlin, and Gradle communities. We also try to be good citizens by giving back. This includes things like sponsoring the Kotlin Lang Slack, contributions to projects we use like Anvil and Insetter, sharing projects of our own like…
Note: This article assumes some familiarity with Dagger, Anvil, and Kotlin. We use Dagger heavily in the Slack Android app for compile-time dependency injection. It’s powerful, flexible, supports basic Kotlin idioms, and allows for advanced dependency injection patterns with less boilerplate. It’s not without its sharp edges though. It slows down our builds with kapt,…
We take developer productivity pretty seriously at Slack. It’s multi-faceted, spreading across build speed, reliability, modernity, and more. One thing we really pride ourselves in is using the latest build tools when possible. Not necessarily bleeding edge (alphas, betas, RC, etc.), but the latest stable versions. Aside from the new features and improvements they bring,…