Building a Slack App in less than 20 minutes with Dark

Remember the Magic 8 Ball? Apparently not all of you do, including my colleagues.

To correct this injustice, I decided to make a modern version in Slack in Dark.

A Magic Eight ball has 20 answers to your yes-or-no questions. You shake it, and it tells you the important answers to your burning life questions. “Magic Eight Ball, will it snow on Christmas?”

Let’s build one in Slack.

Dark reduces infrastructure complexity to the primary elements of a backend: API endpoints, Workers, Cron (scheduled jobs), tools, and datastores. Using Dark, I’m able to build something like this, including the time to set up hosting and tooling, in 20 minutes.

Other than OAuth, this is all it takes to get a magic eight ball respond to a Slash slash command (/asktheeightball).

Some of the Dark code could be a little better — though we’re still early stage and I had to work around some editor bugs (hello “message_count_less_one”).

You can install it to try it out here.

For better or for worse, I’m someone who likes to work on side projects over the holidays. If you do too, and you mention your Slack app in the Dark beta sign up, I’ll get you in right away.

Want to build something, but no ideas? Here’s a few of mine:

• A personal task tracker, that you can add/do items from Slack.
• A way to get affirmations (or photos of a random office pet).
• A connector to another tool you use, like Trello or Github.
• A bot to share fun facts about people in your Slack community (a more automated version of something like this).

Not interested in Slack apps, or timing isn’t right? More opportunities will be coming soon.

You can sign up for the Dark Beta: https://darklang.com/beta.

If you mention a Slack application in the comments, I’ll reach out to get you an account immediately.