Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 items tagged “slack”

2023

Fine-tuning GPT3.5-turbo based on 140k slack messages. Ross Lazerowitz spent $83.20 creating a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 turbo model based on 140,000 of his Slack messages (10,399,747 tokens), massaged into a JSONL file suitable for use with the OpenAI fine-tuning API.

Then he told the new model “write a 500 word blog post on prompt engineering”, and it replied “Sure, I shall work on that in the morning”. # 8th November 2023, 2:44 am

2020

Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess (via) Slack spent three years migrating 99% of their MySQL query load to run against Vitess, the open source MySQL sharding system originally built by YouTube. “Today, we serve 2.3 million QPS at peak. 2M of those queries are reads and 300K are writes. Our median query latency is 2 ms, and our p99 query latency is 11 ms.” # 1st December 2020, 9:30 pm

Slack’s not specifically a “work from home” tool; it’s more of a “create organizational agility” tool. But an all-at-once transition to remote work creates a lot of demand for organizational agility.

Stewart Butterfield # 26th March 2020, 12:21 pm

2019

When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop. Slack appear to have pulled off the almost impossible: finishing a complete, incremental rewrite of their core product. They moved from jQuery to React over the course of two years, constantly shipping new features as they went along. The biggest gain was in rewriting their code to support multiple workspaces, which means desktop client users no longer have to run a separate copy of Electron for every workspace they are signed into. # 22nd July 2019, 6:30 pm

Vitess (via) I remember looking at Vitess when it was first released by YouTube in 2012. The idea of a proven horizontally scalable sharding mechanism for MySQL was exciting, but I was put off by the need for a custom Go or Java client library. Apparently that changed with Vitess 2.1 in April 2017, the first version to introduce a MySQL protocol compatible proxy which can be connected to by existing code written in any language. Vitess 3.0 came out last December so now the MySQL proxy layer is much more stable. Vitess is used in production by a bunch of other companies now (including Slack and Square) so it’s definitely worth a closer look. # 14th February 2019, 5:35 am

2017

How to set up world-class continuous deployment using free hosted tools

I’m going to describe a way to put together a world-class continuous deployment infrastructure for your side-project without spending any money.

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