64 karma · joined December 7, 2011
He wrote the core dependency management engine among other things. His contribution only seems small now only because the project has been around a long time with many new contributors since he’s moved on.
But you can rewind the git history to see he had a huge impact as a creator. I say this as the PM of team that built NuGet.
That being said, a good stack that you know well can affect how quickly you build and how quickly you can adapt the product to changing market conditions.
So here's what we use:
- ASP.NET CORE( - Primarily ASP.NET Razor Pages for the web app. ASP.NET MVC Controllers for the internal and external APIs we support.
- C# - We try to stay on the latest version. The recent pattern matching improvements alone make our code so much cleaner.
- [HTMX](https://htmx.org/)\* - for front-end. We're not at the point where we feel we need a heavyweight front-end framework like React. We like the 37signals approach of shipping "HTML over the wire". We're also big on Web Components. That's a result of our [GitHub heritage](https://github.blog/2021-05-04-how-we-use-web-components-at-...).
- TypeScript - for our front-end JS. This is a recent addition. Most of our JS is still ES6.
- Azure Database for PostgreSql - PostgreSql is rock solid and great for storing all kinds of data.
- Azure Functions - we support three types of custom code skills that customers can use to enhance and customize the bot : JavaScript, C#, and Python. We run these in Azure Functions.
- App Insights - We use this for logging.
- Azure Managed Grafana - We have a nice Grafana dashboard based off our App Insights logs that helps us get a birds-eye view of how everything is doing.
- Azure App Configuration - For feature flags.
As you can see, it's pretty heavily Microsoft based. Part of that is my background. The other part is we got a lot of Azure Credits when we joined the [Microsoft for Startups](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups?rtc=1) program. So it made fiscal sense for us to stick with Azure.
I do like that we can manage everything in a single portal. But some of these tools are not best-in-breed as we will be looking at other options down the road.
You're absolutely right. I think I should have phrased this as "Don't completely neglect your early engineering and infrastructure." Some choices could inhibit our ability to achieve product market fit.
> - Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity lolwut)
I think the pandemic created supply chain problems that affected a lot of companies. There's a lot of reasons to like Azure for me. I'm familiar with it. They focus a lot on developer experience. But this one issue really hit hard and definitely makes me want to be more flexible in how we deploy to the cloud.
> - corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you worked.
Ha! Yeah, we really loved the GitHub way of working. Turns out, GitHub had a unique culture and it doesn't necessarily translate over to whole market. I wish I had included this in the post.
> Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!
Much appreciated!
One of the lessons I omitted (because the post was getting a bit long), is we started off as cross-platform (Slack, Teams, and Discord) but in the end we decided to focus on a single product.
In retrospect, we've struggled to decide if that's a lesson to learn. Should we have started with a single platform? It certainly makes it much faster to build for a single platform. But at the time, we really thought the cross-platform chat-ops would be a distinguishing trait!
Anyways, I hope you enjoy the post!
For our threat model, we focus on _companies_ using Slack, Discord, and Teams, though our efforts apply to communities, etc. For the sake of this question, I'll focus on companies using Slack, but most of it applies to the others.
Even without Abbot, if someone gains access to an employee Slack account, they can do immense damage. So it's very important for companies to enforce good security on Slack such as 2-factor auth, etc. If you use Abbot, that's even more important. To interact with Abbot in chat, a user must be logged into your Slack organization. So we encourage customers to take their Slack account security seriously.
Now it may happen that a Slack account is compromised despite a company's best efforts. So the next level of protection is the ability to protect skills using Abbot's access control. You can restrict skills to a limited set of users. That makes it possible to follow the principle of least privilege and reduce exposure of the most sensitive skills.
Finally, despite our best efforts, there may be the case where someone gains access to a privileged account. Abbot logs every interaction it has with users, whether through the Bot console (in the website) or via chat. So if someone does somehow get access, you can audit what activities they took, what secrets they accessed.
It's also important to look at security from the perspective of a skill author. To create a skill, a user has to be a member of the "Members" role in https://ab.bot/. This requires that they are a member of the associated Slack organization and have logged into https://ab.bot/ with their Slack account (we don't implement our own authentication).
An Abbot Administrator can choose to let anyone in the Slack organization automatically be added to the "Members" role when they log in. That may be appropriate for smaller high-trust companies. For larger companies, administrators may want have tighter control on access to the website.
Skill authors are encouraged not to embed tokens and other secrets in the code for skills. Instead, use the secrets management built in. There's also a proxy link feature for certain cases where a secret is embedded in a URL and you don't want the secret exposed even to skill authors.
That's where we are today.
In the future, we'd like to integrate with Active Directory, LDAP, etc. for managing access to the site and skills. Also, we know that many systems people want to access are going to be behind a firewall. So we are looking into onprem options, but those may be further down the road.
If you have some ideas on where we can improve or areas we should be thinking about, we are definitely interested in hearing about it. This is very important to us.
A big benefit is that you don't have to share credentials from the Twitter account, but still make it available to people in your company.
In that case, when someone runs `@abbot deploy skip-tests`, you'd present a message with a button. You'd have to validate the user that clicks the button yourself.
Abbot does have support for ACLs on skills, but it's for the whole skill. It doesn't yet support restrictions on actions within a skill.
Let me know if you attempt this and run into problems. I'm happy to review code! :)
For example, we have an existing package that uses the GitHub deploy API to deploy software https://ab.bot/packages/aseriousbiz/deploy
If you trigger your deploys using GitHub's API, then you could just use that skill. Otherwise, you can copy that skill's code and adapt it to your needs. Hope that helps!
(In case it's not clear, I'm the "Phil" in the post) :)
I'd be interested to hearing why you feel that way. Perhaps there's an angle I hadn't considered.
It's supposed to be tongue in cheek. My last name is pronounced "Hack". Being hacked is usually a bad thing. But being "Haacked" is something you would like. At least, that's my goal! :)
GitHub turns that on its head. Haley sits at the president's desk and is entrusted with people's first experience with GitHub's HQ. She's an important part of our culture. It's an big responsibility and a position deserving respect (as all positions are).