Delivering software solutions to software engineers is like crafting precision tools for master artisans. Imagine the scrutiny of having an expert peer over your shoulder, aware of every shortcut and oversight. This high standard is exactly why Cloudsmith, a leading global artifact management platform based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is experiencing rapid growth serving experts in software engineering.
Cloudsmith simplifies a complex challenge, enabling any business with a software engineering team to securely integrate both open source and commercial libraries into their software development processes.“Essentially, our job is to ensure the safety and trust behind artifacts that are going into building commercial and open source software,” explains Ronan O’Dulaing, VP Engineering at Cloudsmith.
With a lean team of 50 remote-first employees, Cloudsmith serves a diverse clientele of industry experts across more than 100 countries. To enhance efficiency in code development and delivery, as well as to foster internal and external communication, Cloudsmith uses Slack. “I’ve used Slack before and what makes it different for me at Cloudsmith is that it is much more public. It helps with the cultivation of transparency and trust across the organization and enables us to connect with our partners, vendors, and strategic customers in a way I haven’t been able to do before.”
“Slack is absolutely central to shipping code quickly. It's essential to how we operate our business.”
Crafting Precision Tools
Practicing what it preaches, Cloudsmith continuously streamlines its own work. Automation and efficiency are at the center of its operations, and Slack plays a huge part in this effort, especially when it involves building and shipping code. “From ideation, through development and deployment, to support,” comments Ronan. “Slack is absolutely central to shipping code quickly. It’s essential to how we operate our business.”
As features are developed, key decisions and code changes are tracked in Linear. The Linear-Slack integration pushes updates into project specific channels, enabling cross-functional teams and stakeholders to contribute and observe progress. If, for example, something in Linear relates to the Policy Management initiative, the cross-functional team working in that specific epic will be notified there.
“It enables us to develop product features faster,” comments Ronan. “It cuts down on the overall amount of time it takes us to write code, have it reviewed and deployed safely to production.” It also means that when engineers build software and move it through various environments, notifications come in every step along the way, including during the automated tests run after deployment to production. The success and failure notices are published into a dedicated deployment channel that can be monitored separately with alerts regarding specific thresholds as well as escalations.
Tracking and fixing problems
The team’s reliance on Slack also includes incident and ticketing solutions. Even the software used for incident management is linked into Slack, covering everything from the first notification — thanks to the Datadog integration that is used for monitoring and alerting — all the way to post-incident review. As a result, Cloudsmith maintains the shortest possible meantime to discover and resolve incidents or handle tickets.
With Datadog, a warning might go into Slack if no action needs to be taken yet. But if an error crosses a certain threshold, a phone call will be made through the integration to the engineer on call. Then an incident room is automatically created in Slack with all the necessary commands that include standing up an incident room on Zoom, capturing key events and decisions, updating Cloudsmith staff and customers, updating the status page, and tracking follow-up actions.
“This allows the team working on the incident to focus on troubleshooting the issue,” says Ronan. “It’s been huge for us in terms of reducing our initial response time when something goes wrong. Slack takes care of all the next actions, so there’s no cognitive overhead of running an incident. All you have to do is focus on fixing the problem.”
However, tracking and fixing problems at Cloudsmith also relates to matters that aren’t technical in nature. The company CEO, Glenn Weinstein, appreciates the ability to track long-standing challenges and discussions. “Our Slack history is an invaluable archive of past debates, considerations, and decisions,” he says. “The ability to quickly and easily review detailed discussions – which might have taken place before you even joined the company – is magical.”
What’s more, with a channel per customer, the company CSMs use Slack as their primary system for tracking customer updates, meeting notes, and plans. At the same time, AEs rely on it to provide more detailed and collaborative updates on opportunities tracked in Salesforce, providing the team with an in-depth story about how the deal was won instead of simple statuses. This is much more than simple tracking of numbers. It’s assigning them meaning and narration, creating a knowledge repository, and contributing to a better understanding of customers.
“It's been huge for us in terms of reducing our initial response time when something is going wrong. All you have to do is focus on fixing the problem.”
Supporting relationships
Cloudsmith uses Slack Channels to communicate and collaborate with partners, recruiters, vendors, customers, and prospects. This bolsters the company’s goal of transparency, and contributes to the supportive environment that Cloudsmith aims to create.
“Cloudsmith is by engineers for engineers,” says Ronan. “Engineers speak a similar language and like helping each other out, so most of our channels are public and we encourage our engineers to observe what’s going on and help out where they can. And that’s a big part of why our customers like working with us, because they can connect with us, and get the assistance they need.”
Customers with paid support plans have direct access to Cloudsmith via Slack, so they can get help quickly with questions about a specific capability, product, or support, in the middle of a sales or a deployment process, or when there’s a technical issue. So, to support this huge number of external connections, the company devised a standardized setup, naming conventions, and even ways of categorizing subjects and items that help keep everything organized and accessible.
“Those standards have been there since the beginning,” says Ronan. “And our founders were a big part of establishing those standards, adhering to them, and encouraging people to use Slack the right way.” Weinstein adds: “I love the way Slack helps us run the business. I didn’t think it could replace email, but it has, almost entirely. It’s a better medium than email for collaboration. I’m a true believer.”
He believes that Slack is the backbone of internal comms at Cloudsmith: “It’s the first system most people look at in the morning, and the last system they look at before signing off.” With channels, threads, forwards, and embeds, they have access to a more efficient communication flow in real-time. Which is why employees generally use email only for communicating with vendors and other external parties that don’t use Slack.
Nurturing culture
Even for people so technologically minded as engineers, technical applications of Slack aren’t everything. Which is why the whole Cloudsmith workforce uses Slack to promote collaboration, cultural growth, and openness.
“Slack is our tool and our digital office,” comments Ronan. “With it, there is clarity on what’s going on in the business, what our big picture is, and what our priorities and metrics are. Everyone looks forward to “five minutes with Glenn”, which is published on Slack every Friday to call out hot topics from the week. We enjoy using it for other stuff like banter, channels for music, photos, food, and other things. We also use Slack to acknowledge and recognize people doing great things for colleagues and customers in the “Cheers for Peers” Slack channel. It’s a great way to enrich our culture.”
Overall, for a remote-first workforce, this way of connecting is vital to growing relationships, avoiding silos, and supporting the customer base. In fact, Ronan believes that Slack is equally critical for collaboration and for the ability to respond quickly to any situation, which speaks to internal connectivity and to customer relationships. It’s a single tool that allows the company to integrate various systems together in a way that supports the company mission of efficiency, automation, and transparency while building and supporting relationships.
Ronan summarizes this effect: “Compared to my other jobs, I’m proud to work for a company that has implemented what I think is the best practice in Slack usage. It’s been fantastic.”
