The best prank played in our office was an AutoHotkey script that changed the space character to actually print the word 'space' in all caps.

The next message in Hipchat from the victim was: "WhatSPACEtheSPACEfuck!SPACEMySPACEkeyboardSPACEisntSPACEworking!"

The next time this prank was pulled, ALL symbols were typed out in all caps.

"We expect you to be at your desk from at least 10-5 every day. You may work from home 1 day per month with a few days advance notice."

70 minute commute into SF each way, every day, so I can sit at an uncomfortable desk and not interact with anyone except on hipchat.

In the past, we used skype, hipchat, slack and now ... Microsoft Teams. What a tool.

Yes Teams, it makes total sense to tell me that my message is too long. I totally get it that you want me to rewrite my message and yes Teams, I should have rather attached it as a file to my message to begin with. Yes Teams, I wait for you to finish uploading those files before I can send the message. I'm sure there would be disastrous consequences if you send the message with my attached files as soon as you finished uploading. I don't even want to be productive. Thanks for helping me out.

Slack culture.

Yes, the chat application.

Fuck it, fuck mattermost, HipChat, Skype, and whatever other digital text medium for team communication.

These are great applications, but used for great evil. They feed cliques and passive aggressive "side" conversations. Every team I've been on has something like this, and it allows people to cultivate hate for one another even though they're sitting in the same room.

Texting allows you to complain about a coworker to your clique. Each clique can have it's own thread. This empowers people to silently rip into other team members. It prevents rational adult conversations and builds stupid little secret societies.

So happy to be making this last post

Dear Hipchat, if you are going to implement an Autocorrect Feature, LEARN THE FN TECH LANGUAGE

if i type gradle i do not mean grade
if i type coap, i do not mean soap
if i type mqtt i do not mean mitt
and for f-shake hipchat is not "hip chat", how do you even mess that one up!

(feature now disabled)

In hindsight, this was entirely predictable

Q: How many broken releases of HipChat does a dev manager put up with before they move the team to Slack?

I just tried to correct a spelling mistake in Hipchat by pressing Ctrl + .

Slack or HipChat?

Using HipChat from last 1.5 years. We got many bots written for HipChat to automate process. So I think it's gonna be challenging to switch to slack.

Goodbye HipChat, hello Slack.

After doing ANOTHER update to fix the connectivity issue with the Windows client after waking from sleep, it still doesn't work.

Just happened today!

So since this morning we've been trying to get our website ready for UAT deployment Monday next week, even though we only were told of it yesterday. Since we had some critical merge conflicts to unscrew on our dev branch for promoting to UAT, we sent a warning to everyone on our hipchat group

Dev team: @all please don't commit anything to the repo for an hour or so while we get the branch good for dev and uat build

Tech lead: ok

That should be enough warning, right? Surely our tech lead, who has been piling up our scope creep trying to please our stakeholders, understands well enough not to do a single goddamn thing on our repo until we sort it out, right?

Nope.

10 minutes later our tech lead pushes several changes that not only break our builds but also remove all our configuration transformations. I just stormed out of the office to avoid sending her on a one-way ticket to slapsville and fuckyoutown. Geez goddamn louise.

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

Company after years finally moves away from the ages old and buggy chat infrastructure to use HipChat, which gets adopted quickly and is loved by everyone...
Now Atlassian announces to discontinue HipChat. ;( *sadpanda*

At least we might be able to move to Slack now. :)

i really can't understand, why devs use Slack, HipChat or other Cloud Chats for internal communication.
Its even worse that three of my team use Hipchat in a Channel which the Mod is a former employee!

Every other engineer in my team: "I just pinged Avellable[me] on hipchat 5 seconds ago. He hasn't replied. Maybe I should go to his desk and poke him."

HipChat, this is your last chance to fix the connectivity issues with the Windows client.
I created a Slack account on Friday...

Questions more then a rant...

I've moved from being a lead on imploring DevOps and Agile practices in a large Telco to now working for a security consultancy... The team I'm with are s*** hot when it comes to SecOps (which is why I changed jobs) and I've been hired to he the automation and working practice expert on the team. Already got some of them learning Ansible which is a great start!

I've got delivery now being pushed to Git and all client work being tracked in Jira and properly documented and collaborated through HipChat and other CI tools on the way....

My question is this... Does anyone have some awesome resources to teach people Git, Jira, Jenkins, etc. quickly without forking or branching out on expensive training? Focus on being a technical but consultative team. Ideally just wanna pull some awesome guides and make. My own commits on them for the team... Please fire a story or epic away!

Recently we've checked /sprint in HipChat to test batching of sprint status messages. For testing we wrote what first poped into our minds.

One Dev wrote /sprint We're on schedule
Another wrote /sprint Everything is broken, help

How different tests and first thoughts about progress sometimes can be?

In my company, we have been have been using skype, hipchat, slack and now Teams.

Yet somehow, email always survives.

I get it as a communication channel for external clients as everybody has an email.

Yet when you as a company are using a team messenger, well then use it as your primary communication tool NO EXCEPTIONS or don't use them at all.

The introduction of chat apps as a team tool was a definite turning point for the worst. Just a tool for account executives to hold you by the balls..