ShopTalk Blog

In 2006, Jamie and I were working at a small startup in Palo Alto called Polimetrix. We were fortunate enough to hire a talented CherryPy developer by the name of Christian Wyglendowski (aka Dowski). Christian worked from his home in Canton, OH (aka Dowski Manor). To facilitate collaboration between the three of us, Jamie set up an IRC server.

It wasn't long before a few others in the company realized that our IRC channel was a great way to get our ear whenever they wanted it. We made the mistake of giving the password to a member of the Operations team. Before we knew it, everyone in the company had downloaded Chatzilla and they were crowding our channel. Our new collaboration tool looked more like the Twitter firehose. We created multiple, topical channels to keep things organized. Very quickly, IRC replaced email and IM as the de facto method of communication within the company.

Since IRC was now a venue for Official Company Business and Communication, Jamie created an IRC bot to log everything that was said, along with a web interface to search the logs. I decided to add some interactive commands to the bot. It turned out to be quite useful to have the bot look things up on Google and Wikipedia for us. Just for fun, I even added the traditional and obligatory "!troutslap" command. Once again, we made the mistake of giving other people within the company access to the bot code. In the ensuing months, various people in the company worked to increase our bot's command repertoire to nearly 100 commands. Along with the commands, the bot also grew the ability to notify various channels about interesting activity happening outside of IRC. The bot notified the developers' channel of any svn commits and any changes to Trac. It even alerted us to press activity related to our company, using Google Alerts.

Our IRC server was an integral part of the company now, and it had a real positive effect on our communication and productivity. However, several aspects of it were lacking. For example, there were no fine-grained permission controls. All we had was a server-wide password. We couldn't prevent people from entering channels and we couldn't effectively delete an account when someone left the company. Since logging and search weren't supported out of the box, we had to create our own. Each employee had to download, install, and configure an IRC client. Employees would frequently shut down their IRC clients while they were out of the office, only to realize later that they could never view conversations which happened while they were away. Ideally, each employee would automatically join an appropriate set of rooms when they logged in, but with IRC everyone had to auto-join the same set of rooms and then manually leave the ones that weren't interesting to them.

Due to the incredible utility which we derived from IRC, and due to some of its weaknesses, we decided to build ShopTalk. ShopTalk will support logging and search. We will have a simple bot API to afford our users infinite extensibility. We will have fine-grained permissions that are easy to manage. We will even hook up to your existing LDAP server, so that employees only have to remember one password and sysadmins only have to add or remove accounts in one place. We will provide a web client to a hosted service, so that the users don't have to download anything and they can access it from anywhere. There will be no overhead required to install the server and maintain it; we'll take care of that on our end. We will provide infinite scrollback in all chat rooms, so that you never miss out on an important conversation.

Not all of these features are available in the current beta release of ShopTalk, but they will be soon. Stay tuned.