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.
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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.
Journey Into Front-End Engineering
Shruti Kapoor's journey to becoming a lead engineer at Slack reflects a path marked by exploration and opportunity. Initially introduced to HTML at a young age, her interest was reignited during university while taking a programming course that simplified complex concepts. Upon completing her studies, encountering an automation engineer role led her to pursue front-end development, eventually mastering technologies like React, Angular, and Redux. This narrative highlights the importance of mentorship and seizing opportunities to transition into desired roles within the tech landscape.
Tech Stack and Developer Experience at Slack
At Slack, the front-end technology stack comprises React, TypeScript, and Redux, creating a straightforward environment for developers. This simplicity allows team members to easily integrate previous knowledge and focus on efficient development practices. Notably, Slack employs remote development environments, enabling developers to quickly set up their coding environments with minimal effort, thus streamlining the coding process. This efficient setup not only accelerates development time but also enhances the overall developer experience.
Commitment to Accessibility
Accessibility is a core focus at Slack, with efforts prioritized from the outset of feature development to ensure inclusivity. Shruti emphasizes that building accessible products is not merely a legal obligation but a moral one that enhances user experience for all individuals, including those with disabilities. By implementing comprehensive auditing processes and leveraging design systems like SlackKit, the team integrates accessibility into their workflow effectively. This commitment illustrates Slack's dedication to creating an equitable digital environment while also demonstrating the tangible benefits of accessible design for a broader user base.
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.