Slack

What Really IRCs Me: Slack

Kyle Rankin — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:15:38 +0000

Find out how to reconnect to Slack over IRC using a Bitlbee libpurple plugin.

I'm an IRC kind of guy. I appreciate the simplicity of pure text chat, emoticons instead of emojis, and the vast array of IRC clients and servers to choose from, including the option to host your own. All of my interactive communication happens over IRC either through native IRC channels (like #linuxjournal on Freenode) or using a local instance of Bitlbee to act as an IRC gateway to other chat protocols. Because my IRC client supports connecting to multiple networks at the same time, I've been able to manage all of my personal chat, group chat and work chat from a single window that I can connect to from any of my computers.

Before I upgraded to IRC, my very first chat experience was in the late 1990s on a web-based Java chat applet, and although I hold some nostalgia for web-based chat because I met my wife on that network, chatting via a web browser just seems like a slow and painful way to send text across the internet. Also, shortly after we met, the maintainers of that network decided to shut down the whole thing, and since it was a proprietary network with proprietary servers and clients, when they shut it down, all those chat rooms and groups were lost.

What's old is new again. Instead of Java, we have JavaScript, and kids these days like to treat their web browsers like Emacs, and so every application has to run as a web app. This leads to the latest trend in chat: Slack. I say the latest trend, because it wasn't very long ago that Hipchat was hip, and before that, even Yammer had a brief day in the sun. In the past, a software project might set up a channel on one of the many public or private IRC servers, but nowadays, everyone seems to want to consolidate their projects under Slack's infrastructure. This means if you joined a company or a software project that started during the past few years, more likely than not, you'll need to use Slack.

I'm part of a few Slack networks, and up until recently, I honestly didn't think all that much about Slack, because unlike some other proprietary chat networks, Slack had the sense to offer IRC and XMPP gateways. This meant that you weren't required to use its heavy web app, but instead, you could use whatever client you preferred yet still connect to Slack networks. Sure, my text-based IRC client didn't show animated Giphy images or the 20 party-parrot gifs in a row, but to me, that was a feature. Unfortunately, Slack could no longer justify the engineering effort to backport web chat features to IRC and XMPP, so the company announced it was shutting down its IRC and XMPP gateways.

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FOSS Project Spotlight: Pydio Cells, an Enterprise-Focused File-Sharing Solution

Italo Vignoli — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:20:00 +0000

by Italo Vignoli

Pydio Cells is a brand-new product focused on the needs of enterprises and large organizations, brought to you from the people who launched the concept of the open-source file sharing and synchronization solution in 2008. The concept behind Pydio Cells is challenging: to be to file sharing what Slack has been to chats—that is, a revolution in terms of the number of features, power and ease of use.

In order to reach this objective, Pydio's development team has switched from the old-school development stack (Apache and PHP) to Google's Go language to overcome the bottleneck represented by legacy technologies. Today, Pydio Cells offers a faster, more scalable microservice architecture that is in tune with dynamic modern enterprise environments.

In fact, Pydio's new "Cells" concept delivers file sharing as a modern collaborative app. Users are free to create flexible group spaces for sharing based on their own ways of working with dedicated in-app messaging for improved collaboration.

In addition, the enterprise data management functionality gives both companies and administrators reassurance, with controls and reporting that directly answer corporate requirements around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other tightening data protection regulations.

Pydio Loves DevOps

In tune with modern enterprise DevOps environments, Pydio Cells now runs as its own application server (offering a dependency-free binary, with no need for external libraries or runtime environments). The application is available as a Docker image, and it offers out-of-the-box connectors for containerized application orchestrators, such as Kubernetes.

Also, the application has been broken up into a series of logical microservices. Within this new architecture, each service is allocated its own storage and persistence, and can be scaled independently. This enables you to manage and scale Pydio more efficiently, allocating resources to each specific service.

The move to Golang has delivered a ten-fold improvement in performance. At the same time, by breaking the application into logical microservices, larger users can scale the application by targeting greater resources only to the services that require it, rather than inefficiently scaling the entire solution.

Built on Standards

The new Pydio Cells architecture has been built with a renewed focus on the most popular modern open standards:

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Embracing Snaps: an Interview with Canonical and Slack

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party application support—specifically, the snap package.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager. In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

What Is a Snap?

A "snap" application package is a self-contained piece of software, and although it originally was designed to be hosted on Ubuntu, the package will work across a range of other Linux distributions. This isn't your traditional APT or YUM manager hosting DEB and RPM (or other) package formats.

Again, the appeal to snap packages is that they are self-contained (that is, containerized). They are designed to auto-update and are safe to run. A snap package is bundled with its dependencies, which is what allows it to run on all other major Linux distribution without any modification. It also doesn't have any dependency to any package manager or application store. But, don't misunderstand this—a package manager or application store still can host one or more snap packages; however, the snap package is not dependent to that manager.

Snapcraft is the official tool for software developers to package their software programs in a Snap format.

Sitting Down with Canonical and Slack

Earlier this year on January 18th, Canonical announced the first iteration of Slack as a snap. But, why was this announcement so important? I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Evan Dandrea of Canonical and Felix Riesberg of Slack. They gave me the answers I was looking for.

Evan's team at Canonical builds the platform to make everyone's life easier—that is, Snapcraft. And Felix's team leverages that very same platform to bring wonderful applications, such as Slack, to your Linux desktop.

First, for those not familiar with Slack, it's an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses (of all sizes) to communicate effectively. It's organized, easily accessible, and more important, it allows for better and more efficient communication than email. Slack isn't limited to just professional use; it also can be adopted for more personal uses.

The Interview

Petros Koutoupis: Why snap?

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