[toomuchtodo]

My comment wasn't intended to make you bite.

HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools). The management of multiple teams in one interface on both mobile and mac desktop app (Slack handles this extremely well).

Github issues are enough for me to stick with GH. It Just Works. So you don't have to provide me with Github, Slack, etc as an employer. But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it.

When you're spending 8 hours (or more!) a day in tools, you expect them to be the best/easiest/most productive to use.

[findjashua]

my apologies if my tone come across as combative.

Slack: 1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue.

2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS.

3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do?

4. What exactly do you mean by "stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools"? Do you mean a bot or something that performed those actions on certain keystrokes?

Github: 1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere.

2. Also, the comments on the PR don't have a way to mark someone's suggestion as accepted, and the comments aren't threaded either.

3. My biggest concern is that anyone can accidentally force push, though I don't know if Gitlab has a way of preventing that either.

My point is that for all the talk about meritocracy in the field of technology, when it comes to success and adoption, marketing and visual aesthetics usually outweigh the actual quality of the product. (also see: mongodb, beats etc)

[timblair]

Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack:

* Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again)

* Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring)

* History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and it'll open a canonical URL for that message, allowing you to drop these links to specific messages or points in a conversation into other chats, GH issues or anywhere else you fancy.

[findjashua]

i see. History links does seem like a useful feature (I've pasted links to SO answers in slack, so same could be applied to when someone answers a q on slack)

Stars also seems like a useful feature, but I'm so used to pasting useful stuff in a google doc, never even thought of it

[toomuchtodo]

Thanks for clarifying. That's exactly what I meant.

[sytse]

GitLab protects the master branch by default and other branches can be configured to be protected. Protected branches don't allow force pushes or deletions from anyone.

[findjashua]

good to know, ty!

[woah]

Isn't visual quality a part of "quality"? You can't assume that everyone is like you, and it's a very important factor for a lot of people. Slack didn't invent anything new, but their chat somehow crossed the line to being polished enough for "normal people". As for beats, all I'm going to say is that people don't buy Chanel handbags for their carrying capacity.

[bigiain]

"Github: 1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere."

I have a similar probably-not-well-enough-informed opinion of Github issues. Does anyone have a quick example of a (public) Github project using Github issues in an obviously useful way?

[zardeh]

I think rails (https://github.com/rails/rails) would qualify.

[jitix]

>"But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it."

This is a bit extreme IMO. Tools should be a secondary concern for any developer. If a job is right for a person, such details should not matter.

[eropple]

Those details influence whether the job is right, though. I won't work for a company that uses CVS, for example, because it tells me a lot about the culture of the company. They may have perfectly defensible reasons that make sense to them to use it, but I will, through my own cultural biases and feelings, not be comfortable there.