A growing community
All the ways you can join, build, and even lead the Slack Developer community
TL;DR: To support the growing Slack developer community, we’re expanding the ways you can get together in person with international tours, a community-led meetup program, and Slack Platform workshops through Major League Hacking.
A little over a year ago, the Slack developer relations team set out for Europe on our first tour to meet our community live and in person. We’d had the opportunity to meet people in far-flung (from San Francisco, anyway) places; to get more time with you one-on-one, we wanted to bring more of our team and stay in region longer. During that first tour, we met over a thousand of you in person. We heard from you that app testing was a challenge, and it led to the release of our testing tool Steno. We learned so much about who you are and how you build that we followed it up with an Asia tour.
Since that time, our community has only become more global. Today over 200,000 developers are building on the Slack platform weekly, and eight of the top ten cities by number of Slack developers are outside the US. If we’ve learned anything from our tours, it’s that there’s no substitute for getting to know you live and in person. So it’s time to hit the road again, with more opportunities to join (or even lead your own) Slack communities around the world.
Join our global developer tour
Devs in Asia, save your seats for our summer tour events through the links below:
- Singapore, June 21
- Taipei, June 21
- Hyderabad, June 23
- Tokyo, June 25
- Sydney, June 27
- Bangalore, June 30
- Melbourne, July 2
Our Europe tour will take place in mid-November, with cities and schedule to be announced. Stay tuned @SlackAPI for details.
Become a Slack community leader
There are Slack developers in many more places than we can reach on tour: We see you answering questions online, giving talks, and teaching one another what you know. That kind of community support is critical to everyone’s success, from new people just getting started to others who have been developing on Slack for years.That’s why we’re rolling out a new program that enables passionate Slack developers to grow and lead communities in their own hometowns.
Starting today, you can apply to start your own meetup. Slack Platform community meetups should meet at least 3–4 times per year, and feature speakers from your own area.
We’ll be here to support you and recognize you as a Slack Platform champion. We’ll help you with event content, provide guidance on throwing a good event, and include a swag kit for your first event — and, through our collaboration with Meetup.com, we may even be able to provide you with event venues at a WeWork location.
Develop your skills in training workshops
If you’re not ready to host your own meetup but want opportunities to learn more about the platform in person, we have help for you, too.
Starting this fall, we’ll be working with with Major League Hacking’s global student network to make Slack Platform training workshops available to anyone. They’ll cover the latest and greatest platform features, including interactive buttons and menus, and how to build a workspace app. While they aren’t available just yet, you can pre-register your interest to be notified as soon as they’re ready.
We can’t wait to meet you in person — and in the meantime, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line at developers@slack.com, or reach out over Twitter.
