Hello, Changelog

I am 8 years into this journey with Tatsu.

I first created it as a project that I would use with my development team internally as a replacement for those wonderful standup status meetings. Additionally, I wanted to play with this new API for a new chat application called Slack. It was the first standup product for Slack.

I released the initial version of Tatsu in 2015. It’s time for not only a refresh but a re-thinking.

I have been studying, learning, and thinking. I hate meetings. I hate them because they suck out my soul. Meetings are necessary to provide the communication and the momentum needed to propel business. Meetings in the traditional sense however, are a result of poor planning. A meeting is thought of traditionally as a way to plan but I believe they get in way of planning. Not for you, the one running the meeting, but for all those you had to pull in.

A meeting boils down to discussing and providing thoughts on a topic and the result are communicating outcomes and providing next tasks. This can be distilled to a process and with better tooling, more meetings can be asynchronous. They can be discussed and thought about when the attendees are ready to be thoughtful about the subject at hand. They can be planned out and scheduled as to not create emergencies and meet more deadlines. They can provide better outcomes that can be tracked by stakeholders and make a more calm company.

The journey just started.

The next version of Tatsu will kill the meeting.

But first things, first. I am building Tatsu to have feature parity with the current version but on a new platform and a more appropriate tech stack for the future. It will lay the ground work for the future of Tatsu and hopefully calmer companies around the world.

With that being said, here are the cliff notes of what has been built up until today.

• The Slack authorization flow was built with the newer Slack scopes but with less scopes initially. We will ask for more scopes as the users use the app in Slack.
• The initial setup for the bot was built so that all of the setup can be done right within Slack. You can currently select existing channels to have your updates go into but we want to be able to support creating new channels as well in the setup. That will come in a future release.
• The setup includes displaying the participants for the channel. You currently cannot edit the participants but that will be coming in a future release.
• The initial setup creates the initial questions for the participants to be asked. Future releases will allow you to customize those questions.
• You can start a standup meeting in a channel with a /start command. The next version of Tatsu will be a good Slack citizen and use commands instead of listening for keywords.
• You can complete a full meeting between participants using the asynchronous engine.
• The responses are played back in the meeting channel when a participant finishes their answers.
• A completed meeting notification is sent to the meeting channel when the meeting is complete.

And that is where we are today. There is a LOT that went into getting these initial features off the ground including building a whole new framework to make the code more managable and I am happy where I am right now.

The goal is to release these changelogs every two weeks. If you sign up for the newsletter, you will get notified for new changelogs and you will get a spot in line when the next version of Tatsu is available.

Stick around for more of the journey if you are interested in the building of things. Feel free to provide feedback at any time and help influence the product.