SKGTech’s Slack channel started 2 years ago. By being active in the local community and meeting new people almost every day, we spread the word quite fast so the channel started to get lots of new people almost every day.

We used to greet new people on the team and a few of the admins would say hello publicly or send a friendly DM. It was that time that I decided to create Janitr to automate it.

Janitr is a Slack bot that greets and welcomes new members in a Slack team. It’s completely configurable and easy to use.

While Janitr started as a simple tool to solve a problem of ours, it now counts over 200 teams. I have also spent quite a few hours of my free time to get to the Slack API and to overcome various caveats of it that are not documented. (Slack’s support team is awesome though! Thank you guys…

Sometimes we feel like still chasing the dream. Like it is still far away.

Think again. What were you dreaming of last year? Five years ago? What about when you were 15 years old. What was your goal back then?

I feel like I’m living my last year’s dream. I do. And now I dream bigger. I want to feel it again next year. And after five years. And after thirty years.

I forgot that I am already living my dream.

This is a repost from https://kostasbariotis.com/live-the-dream/. Thank you for reading. Thank you for recommending.

How much time do you need to get to work if you miss the bus?

How much time do you need to get in your house once you have been left outside? What about if you’ve forgotten the oven on?

How much time do you need to recover your primary Database after a sudden “all erased” kind of situation?

The question is:

Are you ready for a complete catastrophe?

Can you identify those scenarios? What’s the possibility for each of them to happen? Can you replicate them?

Major car manufacturers perform crash tests to be able to make better predictions.

Netflix introduced us the Chaos Monkey. …

A friend of mine came into my mind a few days ago. I met him while we were in school. I was around 14–15 years old.

He was my age. From the first time I met him, I was astonished by his early life. He wasn’t talking like my ordinary every day school friends. He had a very unique way of viewing things that nobody I knew had. Unfortunately, he had some experiences that made him seem like this.

He wasn’t in my school. He wasn’t attending any school either. He surprised me when I found out! Until that point, I had never met anybody that wasn’t attending school in my age. I asked him why and he responded by saying that he wasn’t any good at all at school, he couldn’t socialise, he couldn’t concentrate. …

I watch a lot of people on the Internet. Authors, film makers, music producers. I often wonder where do these guys get inspiration and motivation.

It came down to be one thing.

Inspiration is like metabolism. You have to put it in work in order to start working. It won’t work by it’s own. If you just sit and wait, it won’t start working.

Do. Be a doer. Regularly.

“The first rule of doing work that matters: Going to work on a regular basis.”
Seth Godin

This post first appeared at http://kostasbariotis.com/inspiration-motivation-action/.

It’s simple.

This winter I almost quit running, as a result I gained some weight. My insecurities hit their peak and so for the last few months I’ve been trying to get back on track. But being inactive for a while I lost much of the energy I had back when I was frequently exercising.

The past month, I kept being disappointed by my performance. Until today, that I broke my past months records with 5k of continuously running. How I did it? I was being motivated.

While I was running, and being ready to stop and go home, at about 3k, a man passed by me. I took a closer look at him and for my surprise I noticed that he was way older than me and, man, he had so much more energy than me. He frustated me. I couldn’t stand it. So I kept running. I followed him. I was curious for how long I could follow him. How much more energy he had and what it would mean for me to become better. …

Looking back at time, I remember when I was talking about Internet and people would look at me like “Who gives a damn?”.

My friends wouldn’t understand me. It was even hard to find friends, with similar interests.

In my hometown, Thessaloniki, there would be 3–4 Internet Cafes where you would go to get on-line. Most of the people there would do IRC, online gaming or send/receive mails. But it wasn’t that popular yet.Broadband internet at home was still unavailable for the masses.

I would spend hours, even days there. I remember how I would read manically Slashdot, milw0rm, Astalavista, Insecure and Phrack. …

So many options, so many points of view, so many roads to follow.

It’s been some time now that I wanted to talk about how should we act when we are facing a problem and we are in a need of something new that will solve it. Almost every week I will find myself searching and every time I am feeling bombarded.

Choosing the right tool is not a trivial task. It’s rather important. There are a lot you have to consider. If you did chose a tool and have decided early that wasn’t the right one, you should feel lucky. Real consequences comes after time has passed, the tool has find it’s roots on your life and suddenly you are in the need of getting it out. Quite a situation. Sounds familiar? Read on. …