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Protocols vs. Apps
2019.08.09 17:52:14 -03
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In a Telegram discussion group, people were chatting about
alternatives to Slack - the chat application. I didn't much of the
discussion going on, because as I explained there I'm not a Slack
user and have not understood the appeal of Slack at all.
The Slack users in the group presented the main advantages as being:
ease of integration with other tools and a nice GUI (app) on
different platforms.
I come from the IRC world, I can see the value in the threaded-view
in Slack, but what's left? Ease of integration? How many IRC bots
and botnets are there? This is very easy to implement.
So I started thinking about the second point: the app.
I like IRC because it doesn't force me into any single app. It
gives me the protocol and I can choose how to implement my client.
But the feeling I'm getting from the Slack users is that they don't
want that. They want *one* app, one *official* app, preferably
available on *most common* platforms (including mobile ones).
In the information overload world we live in, people don't want
choices. Do I have to pick an app? No, too complicated.
Now I'm let wondering if my talks about Site Reliability Engineering
could be improved with this in mind. I present SRE as a protocol, as
an API. It's up to you to find the tools to implement it.
What if what people want is not an SRE protocol, but just one SRE
app? Just a single choice: Yes or No.
Maybe I need to rethink my arguments.