Slack’s Architecture with Keith Adams

Slack is a chat application that is rapidly growing in popularity. The focus of Slack is to create a polished, responsive tool for productivity that cuts down on the emailing, context switching, and useless meetings that take place at a typical enterprise.

Keith Adams, the chief architect at Slack, joins the show to explain how those high level principles translate into engineering decisions.

Keith previously worked for 7 years at Facebook, contributing heavily to the tools that make PHP easier to develop with at scale. Slack’s core product is also built with PHP, and Keith discusses the similarities and differences between scaling Facebook and Slack.