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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I use slack. In the past ~6 months we: got engage, planned a wedding, a wedding reception (2 different dates), honeymoon to Australia, a baby, a new house, and renting out our townhome.

While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.

So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.

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You got engaged over slack?

The slack 'reactions' feature is a real lifesaver for that kind of thing.

/propose girlfriend

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5 hours ago

Well, technically hubot did the engaging.

Hah. No. That I did in person (though I did flub up my rehersed speech) https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-by=balls187

That's awesome. You're lucky she didn't just elbow you in the face from adrenaline.

I talked about that with the other krav instructors. The girl behind me in purple was there to make sure no one accidentally ran into me while launching into their attack. So it was up to me to protect myself if she hit me.

As you said, luckily it all worked out.

> things like search, pins, and documents

GMail also has built-in search. Google docs has documents. Both are free.

Slack is easily free for a family of 2.

Gmail's search is very good (but only useful if everyone avoids the habit of using Email like an IM client [ie unhelpful body and subject texts]).

Google doc's is okay.

Without thinking about it, slack organizes your messages into topics (aka channels), and it's easy to drag-n-drop files into channels, which are then archived, and easily found.

GMail's search also works for hangouts messages.

Does hangouts have a concept of topics? From my limited uses of it, if you chat with a single person, you can't create a new chat with that person around a different topic.

In slack, I can (and do) have multiple conversations with the same person, but organized around topics.

In hangouts, how do I easily see the files that have been sent? I opened a hangout I've had with a buddy of mine, and it (at least to me) wasn't obvious where those files are.

Also, how do I star a comment? In slack, it's handy to star a comment, or even pin them, to make finding them easier.

No question that you get slack like functionality across a myriad of tools you currently use and are familiar with. However as far as an integrated, easy to use experience, Slack is fairly compelling.

Just to be clear, I was only commenting that GMail's search can be used for chats. I was not commenting on other features, but I'll try to answer your questions if I can.

> Does hangouts have a concept of topics?

Yes, in that you can title group conversations. It's weak though.

> From my limited uses of it, if you chat with a single person, you can't create a new chat with that person around a different topic.

AFAICT, this is correct. If you try to make a group chat with only one person, it will just open the existing chat that you have open with that person.

> In hangouts, how do I easily see the files that have been sent?

I honestly have no idea. whenever I've needed to send a file to someone over hangouts, I share a dropbox link.

> Also, how do I star a comment? In slack, it's handy to star a comment, or even pin them, to make finding them easier.

This is not possible AFAIK.

Their search seems really unreliable to me. It doesn't find things that you can find by just scrolling up.

That's a busy 6 months...

My (now) wife and I decided to start a family. After that decision, we were pleasantly surprised that things moved along quicker than expected, but meant we had to accelerate a lot of things. We're both engineers, so we approached it like engineers: take big problems, break into smaller problems, prioritize, delegate, and execute.

Slack helped us keep focused and organized without a lot of effort on our part.

Also we had a lot of luck, pretty much everything went according to plan.

You had a baby in 6 months? What CAN'T Slack do.

What nine women can't, apparently!

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