Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2020

Running effective meetings in a remote company

As a remote-first company, we’ve spent a lot of time optimizing how we work together as a team. In these challenging times, teams around the world are working to flatten the curve by trying their hand at remote working for the first time. To help these teams succeed, we thought it was the perfect time to share some of the practices and culture we’ve developed to run meetings effectively on Mattermost. Here are seven tips for successful remote meetings.

Lessons Learned Building Messaging Software with a Fully Remote Team

Our experience working with hundreds of customers who use Mattermost, an open source messaging workspace, and a distributed team with hundreds of additional contributors all working remotely, has taught us several lessons about communications tools and how to get work done across time zones.

Lessons Learned Implementing ChatOps

Email overload, distributed teams and excessive meetings have caused many organizations to move their DevOps teams to messaging platforms and thus adopt ChatOps workflows. With thousands of open source installs and hundreds of customer implementations, we have a few lessons to share on interesting DevOps workflows, how incidents can be effectively communicated across distributed teams and what messaging in secure and regulated environments should look like.

Greater protection for Mattermost message data on mobile devices

Push notifications are an important aspect of the Mattermost user experience on mobile. When important messages come in, many users like to be notified on their mobile devices so they can respond quickly. Mobile push notifications make it easier for users to stay informed or take faster action while on the go. When it comes to mobile data privacy, many organizations prioritize secure handling of messaging data, particularly when it may contain mission-critical or proprietary information.

Slack Tips for Remote Communication

As the world is now forced into remote working due to COVID-19, I believe it’s important to make some things explicit that have been implicit for many a remote worker over the past few years with the rise of Slack in the distributed office. These tips are designed to be simple and actionable, with the goal of improving your remote working experience.

Why we moved from Slack to Discord?

Today, at Qovery we have moved from Slack to Discord. We are a software company that is solving developer problems - application deployment. Solving developer problems required to have a close contact with the developers community. For team communication, we used a dedicated Slack workspace, for community communication - another one. Discord has been a real lifesaver for us. Let's start to tell you why..

Maintaining consistency in codebases with Go Vet

Maintaining success in a large open source project is one of the key objectives of Mattermost. We have hundreds of contributors and we want to create a project that could serve as a model in the Go community. Having said that, following idiomatic Go principles is the thing that we care most about while maintaining our code consistency. For this specific task, we utilized go vet and with this blog post, I would like to explain how we pushed the limits of this tool by extending it.

Mattermost 5.21: ChatOps integration with AWS, GitLab, and CodeShip, and more

Mattermost 5.21 includes improvements that will help your team work together more effectively. Some of these improvements, including the following ChatOps integration and plugins, were built during our successful open source chatbot hackfest that brought together 2,000 contributors from around the world.

Onboarding as a remote engineer with Mattermost

We decided to make Mattermost a remote-first company for several reasons. For example, employees don’t have to waste time commuting, we are able to hire from a wider talent pool of self-motivated individuals, and we have coverage in all time zones, which helps us respond to our customers around the world more effectively. And since we’re a remote company building collaboration software, we have plenty of opportunity to dogfood our own product.

Incident management with Microsoft Teams and Zenduty

Teams is Microsoft’s versatile chat and collaboration solution for enterprise communication. Teams come bundled with Office365, offering chat, file sharing, and a host of other collaborative features. The platform also integrates with a host of popular project management applications, chatbots, and alert management platform makes it a hot favorite of production teams.

Announcing new-look notifications for Slack

We’ve had a lot of great feedback about our integration with Slack. Customers find it invaluable to have all the information about an error or issue delivered to a channel of their choice. Using Raygun Crash Reporting or APM and Slack together, everyone involved is alerted to a problem, and an indication of the cause can be ascertained immediately. The appropriate person can then be assigned to complete the investigation and resolve the error or issue pronto.