-------------------------------------------- Protocols vs. Apps 2019.08.09 17:52:14 -03 -------------------------------------------- In a Telegram discussion group, people were chatting about alternatives to Slack - the chat application. I didn't much of the discussion going on, because as I explained there I'm not a Slack user and have not understood the appeal of Slack at all. The Slack users in the group presented the main advantages as bein ease of integration with other tools and a nice GUI (app) on different platforms. I come from the IRC world, I can see the value in the threaded-vie in Slack, but what's left? Ease of integration? How many IRC bots and botnets are there? This is very easy to implement. So I started thinking about the second point: the app. I like IRC because it doesn't force me into any single app. It gives me the protocol and I can choose how to implement my client. But the feeling I'm getting from the Slack users is that they don' want that. They want *one* app, one *official* app, preferably available on *most common* platforms (including mobile ones). In the information overload world we live in, people don't want choices. Do I have to pick an app? No, too complicated. Now I'm let wondering if my talks about Site Reliability Engineeri could be improved with this in mind. I present SRE as a protocol, an API. It's up to you to find the tools to implement it. What if what people want is not an SRE protocol, but just one SRE app? Just a single choice: Yes or No. Maybe I need to rethink my arguments.