For the academics out there, so you have a #slack account in your lab, and is it useful?
I've had one for years and it's been quite handy for code sharing and just general lab communication. But it might be hard for me to maintain due to policies at my University.
@foaylward We have a lab #slack and its a roaring success. It has become an essential communication tool, especially channels created for different projects and interests within the lab and for communicating new publications, talks, software etc
@PhilippBayer maybe I'll have to move over to that or another alternative. I might be able to keep a free slack version but the 90 day window is a pain.
@foaylward@PhilippBayer Discord is really not as convenient as slack though… but I agree the 90-day limit of free slack makes it pretty useless at least as a lab knowledge repository. Maybe a mix of short-term slack + Github for long-term storage, where you’d have some process in place to move useful things to github?
@foaylward@PhilippBayer Not just code! You can share documents, photos, tutorials, anything really on Github. You can organize them nicely in subfolders, you can even create a wiki there although I haven’t tried that yet. You can use things like GithubDesktop for people who don’t want to use the command line, or just directly upload to the website. My current lab uses it in that way and it’s really great!
I imagine the free version has a storage limit but paid accounts don’t (but I haven’t checked that either).
@elduvelle@foaylward see that's my problem with slack, these things should be stored somewhere else, but more often than not it's an additional extra step that's left out. you can't enforce it forever. and then, 3 months later, Slack deletes the code snippet you relied on and you have to rewrite it
@elduvelle@PhilippBayer the free version is essentially just a place for lab announcements, sharing papers for the journal club the next day, etc. Still useful, but certainly limited.
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