Whether they're publishing notifications, responding to /slash commands or carrying a conversation, bots have become an integral part of the way we work with Slack. A bot can do any number of things for your team as part of your day-to-day work, you're only limited by your imagination. For some first-hand experience, check out the Heroku Button Gallery, where users have created all types of bots: from fun bots like poker and Jeopardy!, to more practical ones like a bot that tracks the satisfaction of your team members or one that reminds your team to review existing pull requests.

That said, the real power and fun of Slack bots comes once you know how to build your own. In this...

At the tail end of 2015, JavaScript developers have a glut of tools at our disposal. The last time we looked into this, the modern JS landscape was just emerging. Today, it's easy to get lost in our huge ecosystem, so successful teams follow guidelines to make the most of their time and keep their projects healthy.

Here are ten habits for happy Node.js hackers as we enter 2016. They're specifically for app developers, rather than module authors, since those groups have different goals and constraints:

1. Start every new project with npm init

Npm's init command will scaffold out a valid package.json for your project, inferring common properties from the working directory.

$...

Heroku Connect is written primarily in Python using Django. It's an add-on and a platform app, meaning it's built on the Heroku platform. Part of our interface provides users with a realtime dashboard, so we decided to take advantage of socket.io and node.js for websocket communication. But like all Heroku apps, only one type of dyno can serve traffic. This left us with two choices: manage 2 apps, each with its own repo, and carefully consider when and how we deployed them, or find a way to serve both node and Django traffic from the same app.

This post is from 2014 - check out the update!

For most of the nearly twenty years since its inception, JavaScript lacked many of the niceties that made other programming languages like Python and Ruby so attractive: command-line interfaces, a REPL, a package manager, and an organized open-source community. Thanks in part to Node.js and npm, today's JavaScript landscape is dramatically improved. Web developers wield powerful new tools, and are limited only by their imagination.

What follows is a list of tips and techniques to keep you and your node apps happy.

1. Start new projects with npm init

npm includes an init command which walks you through the process of creating a...