Building an App for Removing Multiple Slack's Files

You're a developer. What do you do in your spare time? One of my most excited task for sharpening my skills is starting build a pet project.

Motivation

Slack is cool! It's free. It supports for team collaboration very well.

However, my team only has storage limits due to a free account. We got a warning message as below:

Your file was uploaded — it’s safe and sound in Slack. Unfortunately your team doesn’t have any storage space left. To get more space, you can upgrade to a paid account or delete some of your older files.

Since my team plan of upgrading to a paid account is still up in the air, I intended to go with "deleting some of our older files" first. (But we will, Slack. You are great!)

Play Around

I got started by googling keyword "remove slack files". Here it is:
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/218159688-Delete-shared-files

Uh huh! But I only could delete one file at a time.

We're afraid it's not possible to bulk delete files. We know that your business data is important to you — that's why we offer API methods to help you manage them.

How about removing the multiple files? Yeah! Slack is very cool again. They provide an API that I am able to bulk delete files:
https://api.slack.com/methods#files

Accordingly, I'm able to firstly call method "files.list" to obtain all files then I just need to loop the list to remove each file with method "file.delete".

Taking a look to the Slack API, I saw what I need to prepare is a "token" for building a very simple application.

In order to obtain a token, I just need to follow the following article. ;)

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/215770388-Create-and-regenerate-API-tokens

Let's go! I have made a test method "files.list" with Postman. Woo hoo! It worked.

Get Down To It

Now, I easily could build a REST client app to achieve this goal. With Java, I used Jersey as REST client API. The following are my steps:

Setup environment: Eclipse, Git, JDK, Maven, Tomcat.
Build a JSF Maven-based app and run on Tomcat 8
Write a service to call the methods needed "files.list" and "files.delete"
Refactor and put to Github. ;)

This is just my first draft, I'm still on my way to improve it. Anybody who wants to join me, you're are very welcome. ;)

The source code is here: https://github.com/vnnvanhuong/slack_bulk_files_remover

Comments

Think like a Engineering Manager

Off-boarding Members can leave the company for various reasons, and as a manager, it is important to take action. Hoping for the best is not a strategy. In the case of a low-performing member, I can kindly issue an official warning, set clear objectives for improvement, and re-evaluate the results. If there is a conflict between members, I need to be mindful and go beyond the situation to list our expectations with corresponding actions. Finally, if a member has a big chance to grow at another company, I can have an honest discussion with that member about the trade-offs. Balance at Work As an engineering manager, it is important to balance involvement in meetings and getting your hands dirty on some topics. The goal is to become a companion to teams. Here are my two actions to deal with the situation: Dedicate time for important-but-not-urgent tasks and prioritize them daily. Categorize work into four lines including management, project support, OKRs, and self-study. Management Conduc...

How to apply Lean - Kanban for your business

This is the topic of Scrum Breakfast meetup this time, speaker: Ms. Phuong Bui - Technical Project Manager of YOOSE Pte. Ltd. http://www.meetup.com/Scrum-Breakfast-Vietnam-Agile-and-Scrum-Meetup/events/230313727/ Lean comes from Lean manufacturing is a method that focuses on elimination of wastes. In other words, this is a set of principles for archiving the quality, speed and customer alignment. The first time I knew about the term "Lean" is from the book Software Craftsmanship . Sandro recommends if we want to transform our pet projects into a real business, we should get familiar with Lean Startup concepts. In this talk, Ms. Phuong pointed out some major wastes includes information (ex: unclear requirements), processes (ex: waiting), physical environment and people. Knowing what the problems should be the best way to eliminate them. The difference between Single item flow and Batch processing is the second main point; and it is the Lean's idea. Batch pr...

Applying pipeline “tensorflow_embedding” of Rasa NLU

According to this nice article , there was a new pipeline released using a different approach from the standard one ( spacy_sklearn ). I wanted to give it a try to see whether it can help with improving bot’s accuracy. After applying done, I gave an evaluation of “tensorflow_embedding”. It seemed to work better a bit. For example, I defined intents “greet” and “goodbye” with some following messages in my training data. ## intent:greet - Hey! How are you? - Hi! How can I help you? - Good to see you! - Nice to see you! - Hi - Hello - Hi there ## intent:goodbye - Bye - Bye Bye - See you later - Take care - Peace In order to play around with Rasa NLU, I created a project here . You can have a look at this change from this pull request . Yay! When I entered message “hi bot”, then bot with “tensorflow_embedding” could detect intent “greet” with better confidence scores rather than bot with “spacy_sklearn”. The following are responses after executing curl -X POST loc...

Books Read in 2022

My bookshelf Technical - Operating System: Three Easy Pieces. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. - The Effective Engineer. Edmond Lau. - English Grammar in Use. Raymond Murphy - Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering. Brooks Jr., Frederick P. - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd edition). Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister. - A Philosophy of Software Design. John Ousterhout. - Modern Computer Architecture and Organization: Learn x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures and the design of smartphones, PCs, and cloud servers. Jim Ledin. Thought Provoking - Đúng Việc. Giản Tư Trung. - A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking. - Một đời như kẻ tìm đường. Phan Văn Trường. - Một đời thương thuyết. Phan Văn Trường. - Tinh hoa xử thế - Dám bị ghét. Kishimi Ichiro, Koga Fumitake. - Phép màu để vượt lên chính mình. Nhan Húc Quân. - Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship Through Woodcraft. Robert Baden-Powell. - Thay Đổi Cuộc Sống Với Nhân ...

Separate Constructing a System from Using It

I n the real world, in order to use a building (hotel, supermarket, etc) we need to construct it first. This concern should be applied for software development as well. Step by step, I would like to show you the issue about no separation of constructing and using it and then I'll give you some approaches to overcome this issue. | Note : you can find the below demonstrated code here Take a Look the Following Simple Application Used tools and technologies: Eclipse (Mars), JDK 1.8 I had an App which uses Controller . Controller uses Service (an interface). Finally, Service has one concrete class is DefaultService . //package vn.nvanhuong.system.separationconstructing; public class App { public static void main(String[] args) { Controller controller = new Controller(); controller.doAction(); } } public class Controller { private Service service; public void doAction(){ System.out.println("doAction in Controller"); getService().execut...

vhandit

Search This Blog