Our legal team shares its favorite tips and tools for automating repetitive tasks, collaborating with outside counsel and much more, all inside Slack

This year, I got a unique opportunity to call in at Mattercon 2020 and give a talk about my experience working on Mattermost and open source software (OSS) in general. I talked about how OSS helped me grow as a self-taught developer and how working on issues from Mattermost’s repos helped me gain experience and confidence in software development. In this article, I will highlight some of the things I talked about and also throw in a few pointers related to working on OSS.

Did you miss Part 1 of this series? It was quite a show! Luckily, you can still go back and read it! We’re looking at different B2B customer support channels from two distinctly opposite perspectives: cost center (support is a necessary evil of business) and profit center (support can hold its own in the revenue generation conversation). In Part 2 we are looking at two of the most modern support channels, self-service and visual support. And we’ve got a bonus at the end!

After careful consideration, Rocket.Chat is officially moving its documentation to GitBook. With this change, we expect to improve the rate of which we develop, fix, and maintain documentation by making sure everyone on the team can edit it easily. Previously, we used Jekyll for documentation purposes. However, as time passed, we faced more and more issues with Jekyll. Therefore, we’ve decided to move to Gitbook which provides a more user-friendly and collaborative product for everyone.

One of the most common frustrations we hear from team leaders who don’t have robust project management practices in place is a feeling of constant firefighting, leaving them unable to complete projects on time or within budget. In fact, in a recent PWC poll, only 2.5% of companies successfully completed all of their projects. Firefighting is a natural human response to a chaotic workload as a means of “getting more done”.

Studies of customer feedback already tell us that the majority of customers prefer to solve their problems on their own over contacting a support agent. It makes sense—self-service puts the customer in the driver’s seat, empowering them to be autonomous and find the right answers with speed. But self-service is also better for businesses. It enables them to do more with less and frees their support teams’ time up for higher-stakes issues that require a human touch.

Tanay is the Head of Developer Relations at n8n. He has published books on WebVR, virtual assistants on Raspberry Pi, and FirefoxOS. He has been listed in the about:credits of the Firefox web browser for his contributions to the different open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation. I’ve been involved in the DevOps world for a while and yet I finished reading The Phoenix Project only recently. The book piqued my interest in how teams execute their incident response playbooks.