Introduction In the world of chatbots, natural language processing (NLP) has taken center stage, and Hugging Face Transformers has emerged as a powerful toolkit for working with NLP models. Slack, a popular team collaboration platform, offers a great environment for deploying custom bots to enhance communication within your workspace. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the process of creating a Slack bot powered by Hugging Face Transformers. By the end, you’ll have a conversational bot capable of performing various NLP tasks right in your Slack channels.

Invariably, every new team goes through the storming, forming and norming phases. There is the initial honeymoon period. Everyone is excited, nobody wants to step on toes and we all crave quick success. Then, some one gets annoyed, the project slows down and shit just hits the fan. How the hell, are you as an engineering lead supposed to handle the shit storm? I have hit the storming phase several times in my career (the curse of job hopping).

I have a lot of feelings swirling around the announcement that Broadcom is acquiring VMware. When I joined VMware I was under no illusions of its current state. Pretty stagnant, and living on its data center legacy. There were a lot of pivots to public cloud in progress but none of them were really gaining traction in the market. I also knew there was an incredibly talented and empathetic group of people working there.

I started my first salaried job in 2010 as a sysadmin for the University library. As a new person in tech, still going to college, I knew nothing. I thought I knew something. After all, I had taken at least 2 semesters of Java and worked part-time as a Perl dev :eyeroll:. At that point in my career, the field of unknown unknowns was vast. As an intern where I learned Perl, I leaned heavily on the senior members of our team to teach me pretty much everything about scripting languages.

My wife was remarking on how bad my current domain excellent.io is to spell when I set her up with an account for email. She has also recently started taking a C++ fundamentals class and asked how hard it would be to get a new domain that sounded more developer focused. Seeing as dumpsterfire.dev was already taken, I thought the next best word to describe tech is “tirefire”. Now my bank account is short $12 and I am the proud owner of tirefire.