Building a Donut Clone

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I love Donut. In the past, it has done a great job of connecting me with coworkers or with new people large networking Slack. However, when I went to go add it to a new Slack that I started, I noticed that it will only pair up to 24 users per round for free. The group I run has 175 people in our #coffee-buddies channel. How much would that cost me? Maybe it’s not too much… OH $399/month??? I can build something that does a good enough job. So I built Slack Pairs.

Slack Pairs is a super basic Rails app that just needs free-level hosting on a platform like Heroku. The most challenging part of the setup is actually setting up the new Slack app and making sure it’s paired correctly. The easiest way to do this is to create a new channel in your slack instance, add one other person, and then run the task. If it sends you both a message, it’s set up correctly! Then you just change the channel id to the correct one and you are off to the races.

I would love to make this app more extensible and not require a fork or code modifications. I think that addition would be relatively simple, I just haven’t had time. I’m open to submissions if you have any cool ideas to improve it!

Important Code: Exporting Slack Emojis

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What is the most important thing in your life? If you say Slack emojis, then you maybe have a misplaced sense of importance, but also, I understand. One of my current slacks has over 4,000 emojis. I wanted to pull them all down so I could add the ones that aren’t inside jokes to another slack… but how? There are a number of JS scripts out there that say that they will do this but I think Slack has since updated the JSON that they send so those didn’t work anymore. Being a rubyist, I wrote a parser for that JSON to export all the emojis. Downside: I still had to download all the JSON files. If you are more ambitious than me, I’m sure there is a way to do that via JavaScript fairly easily.

  1. Go to https://your-slack.slack.com/customize/emoji

  2. Open up developer tools then the network tab.

  3. Filter by XHR or just search for emoji.adminList (might have to reload the page).

screenshot-of-emoji-file.png

4. Copy and paste into a file called emoji#{number}.json with #{number} being the file number.

5. Keep scrolling down and keep copying and pasting and creating files.

6. Download the script into the same directory

7. Run script like this: ruby download_emojis.rb NUMBER_OF_FILES_CREATED Note: NUMBER_OF_FILES_CREATED should be replaced with however many files you created. It defaults to 10.

8. The files will be created in an emojis folder with the name of the emoji as the file name.