Developing a integration for Slack is not easy task. Slack’s API is pretty great and allows a lot of freedom. But when you start adding buttons, integrations and, more recently, interactions with blocks your code will quickly become a never-ending list of if/the/else clauses.

While developing integrations the new slack interactions we were writing were becoming unmangeable. For every new button there would be a new if block_id == "feedback-button" so new solutions needed to be found.

The best one was using Django’s routing mechanism to treat the interactions as urls on a website. Once this mindset was introduced everything became much easier. Let’s start with some examples. First the main methods that make this possible:

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def slack_resolver(url: str) -> ResolverMatch:
    for urlconf in settings.SLACK_URLCONFS:
        # try the various urlconf files we have
        try:
            resolver = resolve(url, urlconf=urlconf)
            return resolver
        except Resolver404:
            continue
    raise Resolver404()

def slack_reverse(viewname, args=None, kwargs=None):
    for urlconf in settings.SLACK_URLCONFS:
        try:
            return reverse(viewname, urlconf=urlconf, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
        except NoReverseMatch:
            continue
    raise NoReverseMatch(f"Reverse for {viewname} not found: args: {args}, kwargs: {kwargs}")

As the method signatures show the slack_resolver method receives the current url being processed and return the resolver to call the view’s function.

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I’ve been postponing playing this game for a long time. Being a father of a 2 year old and having my own company doesn’t allow a lot of time for JRPG’s. But I couldn’t resist much more. I love the style of this game. And honestly it touches on everything I love on JRPG’s, demon-like robots (Legions), great story (a bit convoluted, but I love those), fresh mechanics that make fighting super fun and quirky characters that give life to the world that was created.

Image from https://astralchain.fandom.com/wiki/Axe_Legion

As far as JPRG’s go this one changed the formula a bit because you have levels (chapters). Progress is done by missions and not a free flowing experience like normal JPRG’s (like Final Fantasies). I liked this approach a lot because it focuses your time and doesn’t make you grind and spend endless hours just to get somewhere.

Definitely a game to go on the excelent experiences list.

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It is possible! You just need to forget a couple of email clients.

At Attentive we started developing a new Reporting email. The requirements were that this report would have insightful information about a Team’s Sales Pipeline. We would send on the first work day of the month a Slack message and email.

The email and the Slack messages would also have a PDF version attached.

When we started to spec out the implementation we started investigating how to build the email we came accross an article by Litmus where they mentioned emails without tables.

Building an email without tables is a dream come true. No more endless nesting of HTML tables would produce much cleaner and easy to maintain code.

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