Reading room.
Engineering blogs & AI research
A reading room from engineering teams and AI labs: titles, short feed excerpts, and links to the originals. For my own essays, explore the writing archive.
- 1359 articles tracked
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Sources
Shipyard: How We Built Slack’s Next-Generation EC2 Platform
Over the past few years, we’ve been on a journey to modernise how we run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at Slack. In our first post, Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure, we shared how we moved from a single C…
Agentic Testing: Where Agents Fit in the E2E Testing Stack
Abstract Agent-driven end-to-end (E2E) tests add a new exploratory layer to testing, but should they replace traditional deterministic tests? We ran more than 200 agentic E2E workflows using the Playwright MCP, Playwrigh…
Slack AI: The Path to Multi-Cloud
In early 2023, Slack faced a foundational challenge: serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at enterprise scale with the security, reliability, and performance our customers expect. Over three years, we evolved from basic…
From SSH to REST: A Security-Driven Modernization of Slack’s EMR Data Pipelines
Excerpt By 2024, Slack s data platform had accumulated 700+ SSH-based operators orchestrating critical data pipelines. We re talking daily search indexing that processed terabytes of data, analytics jobs powering busines…
Managing context in long-run agentic applications
Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms…
From Custom to Open: Scalable Network Probing and HTTP/3 Readiness with Prometheus
The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring tr…
How Slack Rebuilt Notifications 📣
Introduction 🔔 At Slack, notifications are how teams stay in the loop, but they can also become overwhelming when not designed with intention. Our goal was to make staying informed feel effortless. We set out to rebuild…
Streamlining Security Investigations with Agents
Slack’s Security Engineering team is responsible for protecting Slack’s core infrastructure and services. Our security event ingestion pipeline handles billions of events per day from a diverse array of data sources. Rev…
Android VPAT journey
Background A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a document that outlines how well a product aligns with accessibility (a11y) standards. Its primary purpose is to inform customers about a product s a11y fe…