Software Engineering Daily

Frontend Engineering at Slack with Shruti Kapoor

Nov 6, 2024

Shruti Kapoor, Lead Member of Technical Staff at Slack, shares her journey into frontend engineering, highlighting her work on features like Huddles and the Slack redesign. She emphasizes the vital role of accessibility in tech, discussing tools and strategies used at Slack to ensure inclusive design. Shruti also dives into the importance of collaboration between designers and developers in creating accessible components. Additionally, she touches on the impact of new technologies, such as the React compiler, in optimizing performance and enhancing the user experience.

44:45

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Shruti Kapoor

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Quick takeaways

Slack's evolution from an internal tool to a global communication platform showcases the potential for innovation in technology.

Shruti Kapoor highlights the importance of accessibility in product development, emphasizing that it enhances user experience for everyone.

Deep dives

Origins of Slack

Slack began as an internal communication tool for TinySpec, a game development company that pivoted its focus when a game project failed to gain traction. By recognizing the potential of their communication platform, the founders transformed it into a standalone product that was eventually launched in 2013. Today, Slack is a widely used tool across numerous workplaces, facilitating team collaboration and communication globally. This transition from a game development tool to a robust communication platform illustrates the adaptability and innovation in the tech industry.

Intro

2min

From Curiosity to Career in Tech

15min

The Importance of Accessibility: Moral, Legal, and Financial Perspectives

2min

Ensuring Accessibility in Frontend Development

9min

Optimizing React with the New Compiler

4min

Embracing Automation in Creative Tasks

4min

Coding with Humor: Boosting Skills through AI and Developer Jokes

9min

Slack is a team communication platform that originated as an internal tool within Tiny Speck, a game development company. When the company realized that their game would not achieve commercial success, they changed direction and repurposed the communication tool into a new product which eventually became Slack. Slack was launched in 2013 and is now ubiquitous in workplaces around the world.

Shruti Kapoor is a Lead Member of the Technical Staff at Slack. She’s worked on features including Huddles, the recent redesign of Slack, and currently works on accessibility. She joins the podcast to talk about her path into frontend engineering, the frontend tech stack at Slack, the developer tooling, how Slack evaluates new technologies, and more.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

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