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Jim Ray

Jim Ray is a Director of Developer Advocacy at Slack with an extensive background in technology and developer relations. Throughout his career at Slack, he has held multiple roles in developer advocacy and support, progressing from Enterprise Developer Advocate to his current leadership position.1

Professional Background

Jim Ray has a diverse professional history in technology and media, including roles such as:

  • Director of Developer Advocacy at Slack (August 2022 - Present)
  • Staff and Senior Developer Advocate at Slack (2019-2022)
  • Enterprise Developer Advocate at Slack (2017-2019)
  • Developer Support at Slack (2016-2017)
  • Director of Technology at The California Sunday Magazine
  • Senior Developer at Mule Design Studio
  • Lead Developer at msnbc.com
  • Multimedia Producer at msnbc.com and Chicago Tribune1

Professional Insights

He is known for his expertise in workplace communication and automation. In a podcast interview, he emphasized that Slack is more than just a chat tool, stating, "If you're just using Slack for communication, you're overpaying for a chat tool".2 Ray is passionate about reducing content switching and improving workflow efficiency through Slack integrations.

Ray has also authored a book called Build, which offers guidance on creating apps for Slack, demonstrating his commitment to developer empowerment.3

Highlights

Apr 29 · linkedin

When we launched a new set of features to make building Slack apps more modular, the Deno JavaScript runtime was an instrumental part of our technology stack. With Deno, we were able to build a system that was safe and performant by default.

As someone who's been decidedly skeptical of JavaScript for most of my working life (I've got the scar tissue to prove it!), I have to say I've really enjoyed using Deno as a runtime. The fact it ships as a single binary made it so easy for us to integrate with the Slack CLI. I personally love the use of a standard import command for modules. And the security and permissions model just makes sense, it's exactly what you'd design if you were building a new runtime today.

The Deno team has now written up a case study about how we got there: https://lnkd.in/epf3yUKc

Thanks to the crew at Deno and my colleagues Kurtis Kemple and Taylor Singletary for putting this together. Give the case study a read and then head over to api.slack.com to build awesome Slack apps.

Apr 19 · linkedin

Exciting news — now, every Slack paid customer (not just Enterprise) can add Slack AI to their workspace. https://lnkd.in/eWx_uAyK

Because this is a paid upgrade (those LLM queries are not cheap), I've had a number of folks ask me how I've been using Slack AI. We've had a version of this working in-house since last fall, and it's honestly become indispensable.

The most immediate improvement you'll notice is search. Now you can ask questions ("perform natural language queries" in nerd) of your entire Slack corpus. This was huge for me when I came back from pat leave last year, I could ask questions like "What does Rob Seaman see as the biggest opportunity for the Slack platform?" or "Who's working on Slack AI?" and get back not just the usual list of posts but a composed answer with footnotes to the relevant posts.

Recap, which we just launched, is a new daily digest feature that I'm starting to work into my everyday routine. We all have channels that we feel a need to keep up with, but which aren't super urgent — think about every channel that you have on mute. Add that to your recap and you can get a summary to look through with your morning coffee or as you're headed home for the day.

Because I'm a bit of a completionist by nature, I tend to prefer to go through all of my channels, I honestly don't use the channel and thread summary features all that much. That said, when I do need them to quickly get up to speed on a new feature or initiative, they're great.

My favorite part of Slack AI is it conforms to my number one rule for using AI at work: use these tools for you not because your boss or company orders it. When automation is a top-down, mandated technology, I don't think it's always very effective; however when it's a set of tools that can empower individuals to do their best work in the way they work best, I think the upsides are tremendous.

Related Questions

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How has Jim Ray's role evolved over the years at Slack?
What are Jim Ray's thoughts on the future of Slack AI?
How does Jim Ray approach developer advocacy at Slack?
What are some notable achievements of Jim Ray in his career?
Jim Ray
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United States