README.md

Slack

The Enspiral Dev Academy Slack community is where most of our communications will take place. First off, you'll need to join the Slack community. When you sign up, Slack will send you an automated email. If you don't see it, have a dig around your inbox and filtered folders for the invitation.

When you join up, you will be automatically added to our core channels. However you will need to search for your cohort specific channel (e.g. #kakapo-2016) and join it. You should also join:

The core channels are

1. Your cohort-specific channel: for cohort communication. For example, finding a partner to pair with, problem solving, and checkin coordination.
2. #code-helpdesk: If you can't get help on a problem in your cohort channel, come here next! Read by grads, teachers, and friendly developers.
3. #general: stuff everyone in the EDA community should know about. For example, events, announcements, congratulating people.
4. #show-eda: stuff you're working on that you'd like to share. New open source projects, games, pretty things. One of your final assignments in Phase 0 requires you to use this channel.
5. Either #auckland or #wellington: site-specific news, meetups, "I'm locked out", "Who owns the car that's parked me in?" etc.
6. #random-stuff: web development jokes, cat GIFs, xkcd.

Your username (important)

To better identify people on Slack we use a standardised naming convention. Please use the pattern:

firstName_lastNameINITIAL_cohort

1. first name
2. last name initial
3. cohort

E.g. anahera_p_kakapo

Using Slack

We recommend that anytime you are working on the material you have the Slack app open.

To see who is in the channel, click the 'i' icon in the top right corner. If you have a specific question for someone you can direct message them, but keep in mind that others in the community might know the answer too, so don't cut yourself off from the pool of community knowledge by posting unnecessary private messages.

You can tag someone in your post by putting an @ in front of their user name. If they are not online, they will be notified via email. If you want the whole group to know something, you can use @channel. This will send an email to everyone in the channel. Nonetheless refrain from using @channel for channels that are not the cohort channel.

For the full tour, see Slack's official tour.

Here's a snapshot of Hihi-2016's cohort slack channel - a safe, fun, helpful space: