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Discussion on: Share your experience using IRC and other communication tools as a developer

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Ben Sinclair

Nowadays I use weechat which I leave going in a tmux session. I don't check it often, usually just when I need something specific.

I do still use IRC a bit for development. Mainly freenode, with channels like #drupal-support who are really very good for quick answers to Drupal questions (and Drupal is definitely the sort of thing that makes you have a lot of questions).
Because I'm there, I'll also have other channels open, like general chats, though I mostly idle.

I use Slack at work, which I don't see as particularly different (there's even a Slack-IRC gateway which is pretty transparent). The main differences are that Slack is proprietary, relies on one company and isn't going to be around in 20 years :P

I used IRC in the 90s, but in the early 2000s I wrote an IRC client plugin for another chat system, which got used by - I think - two other services. It wasn't very good and I did it by referring to the RFCs and sniffing packets to and from my regular client.

I also used to use a combination of a VPS, irssi, bitlbee and screen to send all my social media to one interface, which I could connect to from anywhere. It's much, much easier to read a Twitter feed when it's in chronological order rather than the top-posted feed you get in the app. I only stopped doing that because the various services kept changing their APIs and making it more difficult for bitlbee to keep up.