This is the best post to HN in quite some time. Kudos to the detailed and structured break-down.

If the author had a Ko-Fi they would've just earned $50 USD from me.

I've been thinking of making the leap away from JIRA and I concur on RDS, Terraform for IAC, and FaaS whenever possible. Google support is non-existent and I only recommend GC for pure compute. I hear good things about Big Table, but I've never used in in production.

I disagree on Slack usage aside from the postmortem automation. Slack is just gonna' be messy no matter what policies are put in place.

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xyzzy_plugh 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anecdotally I've actually had pretty good interactions with GCP including fast turn arounds on bugs that couldn't possibly affect many other customers.

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notyourwork an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Curious from you or others when FaaS isn’t possible? What criteria do you look for to decide or migrate off?

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unethical_ban 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you use if not slack? OPs advice is standard best practice. Respect peoples time by not expecting immediate response, and use team or function based channels as much as possible.

Other options are email of course, and what, teams for instant messages?

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jasonpeacock 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve always that forums are much better suited to corporate communications than email or chat.

Organized by topics, must be threaded, and default to asynchronous communications. You can still opt in to notifications, and history is well organized and preserved.

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jasonpeacock 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The bullet points for using Slack basically describe email (and distribution lists).

It’s funny how we get an instant messaging platform and derive best practices that try to emulate a previous technology.

Btw, email is pretty instant.

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nottorp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you work in a team, email is limited to the people you cc: while a convo in a slack channel can have people you didn't think of jump in* with information.

See the other point in the article about discouraging one on one private messages and encouraging public discussion. That is the main reason.

* half a day later or days later if you do true async, but that's fine.

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dijit an hour ago | parent [-]

I am neutral in this particular topic, so don’t think I’m defending or attacking or anything.

But aren’t mailling lists and distribution groups pretty ubiquitous?

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nottorp an hour ago | parent [-]

But - from the people you actually want to get to contribute - emails come with an expectation of a well thought out text. IMs ... less so.

I've been working across time zones via IM and email since ... ICQ.

I'm probably biased by that but I consider email the place for questions lists and long statuses with request for comments, and for info that I want retained somewhere. While IM is a transient medium where you throw a quickie question or statement or whine every couple hours - and check what everyone else is whining about.

	▲	dijit an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have now been roped into talking more about a topic I have no interest in and am completely ambivalent to… :/ But clearly, thats cultural. If you keep your eyes on the linux kernel mailing you’ll see a lot of (on topic) short and informal messages flying in all directions. If you keep your eyes on the emails from big tech CEOs that sometimes appear in court documents; you’ll see that the way they use email is the same way that I’d use slack or an instant messenger. Thats likely because its the tool they have available- we have IM tools that connect us to people we need (inside the company)- making email the only place for long form content, which means its only perceived as being for long form content. But when people have to use something federated more often, it does seem like email is actually used this way.

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unethical_ban 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I get it, email accomplishes a lot. But it "feels" like a place these days for one-off group chats, especially for people from different organizations. Realtime chat has its places and can also step in to that email role within a team. All my opinion, none too strongly held.