[nthj]

So a lot of times, on a project, maybe right after a production deploy, I'll just keep the production logs open on a spare monitor or a TV, and passively keep an eye on what's going on while working on other things. I'm not looking for anything specific: my intuition just kinda kicks in if something seems amiss. Suddenly jumped from a few errors a minute to a continual stream of backtraces? The logs stopped streaming entirely? I know it when I see it. Kinda like Cypher watching The Matrix.

Now, if I had to tab between panes across 2, 3, 6 app servers, background workers, and database instances, I just wouldn't bother. It's only useful as background noise. But that's fine, because there are tools that let me easily consolidate all of my logs into one stream.

And that's how I see Slack. Just like I can't get a notification every time I have one exception happen in production, because it would kill my workflow, I can't get a notification every time somebody updates a Trello card or resolves a Zendesk ticket. But what I /can/ do is passively watch the stream: Slack is the consolidated logfile, not for my production servers, but for my company.

Could I configure all that with IRC? Yes. Do I want to set it all up, when Slack lets me OAuth against every single service imaginable with one click? No, I really don't. My time is far more productively spent elsewhere.