Slack apps

I’m thinking about making a slack app. I’ve been playing around with it on/off for the last week and it is an impressive API surface. Documentation is really good. Perhaps the hardest part is that most examples and tutorials centre around Node, Python or Java. Slack provides bolt in those languages but I basically refuse to write anything in python or node considering their memory bloat and difficult package management.

Writing a Slack app using Go has not been as easy as it would be using python or node though. This is due to the way Slack’s BlockKit is designed. Being able to dynamically update json is much easier in those languages. Stil, the slack-go library is pretty good. It’s only detractor is documentation. I’ve had to read source, and just try various things to get parts working.

The app I want to explore, and if viable write is a cloud platform manager. Render, Fly, Digital Ocean, Vultr etc all provide API access and some a full CLI. I think being able to get a read out of services, logs, billing etc via slack would be pretty useful. This means you can check your cloud assets via slack from anywhere - the CLI is limited to your machine. It also means you need an API on the device you’re using.

A stretch goal should this be viable is to create is for several clouds. I think at first it would be for Render or Fly.

Lots more ideation and overall design is needed but at worst this would be something I’m keen on using (I use both Render and Fly).

Tags:

#ideation #slack #go