This talk will cover the basics of talking to the Slack API with a handful of Node libraries: node-fetch, ws, and express. I’ll show some incremental examples for building a (zombie horror) Choose-your-own-adventure app, and how the building blocks used for that can be extended to build a productivity app, namely an iCalendar processor that gives in-channel notifications when meetings are about to start.

We’ll cover:

• Creating personal Slack teams
• Granting auth to a new app
• Using await/fetch with bearer tokens for simple data collection and message posting
• Using WebSockets for real-time messaging
• Callbacks and triggers from user button clicks
• Registering slash commands
• Surviving the zombie apocalypse

Curtis Autery is a software engineer at Beam Dental, campus instructor for Girls Who Code, runs a coding club at Graham Expeditionary Middle School, and is an occasional speaker and mentor for the Columbus freeCodeCamp chapter.