Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen teams using their own chat rooms, more and more, during the competition. So, we’re really excited to announce that this year, we’re replacing our official IRC channel, with a free Slackline community channel!

Okay, but what is Slackline?

Slackline is a service that allows you to collaborate seamlessly with other Slack teams. It saves you time and energy when working with others, by giving you the ability to connect different Slack teams together in private, shared channels.

Say you’re a design shop of three, using Slack to communicate with your coworkers, and you’re working on a project for a company that also uses Slack. With Slackline, you can create a private shared channel, alongside your team’s regular Slack channels, where your two Slack teams can communicate.

How will the Rails Rumble use Slackline?

In addition to creating private shared channels, Slackline also hosts a number of free, public, community channels. And this year, they’re hosting a brand new, official #rails-rumble community channel. So, instead of individuals joining our old IRC channel, and not having a great way to speak with teammates during the competition, you can simply create your own free team on Slack, and connect it to our new free community Slackline channel!

When you speak in your team’s #general channel, it’s private, just like normal, and just for your team. And when you go into the #rails-rumble community channel, you’ll be able to chat with other teams that have connected their Slacks, as well as the Rumble organizers (unless we’re asleep, because we get to do that).

A big thanks to Slackline for hosting our free community chat for this year’s competition, we think it’s going to be great!

Oh, and the community #rails-rumble channel is already up and running, so feel free to connect your Rails Rumble team’s Slack, whenever you have it.

- @tsmango