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the task:

Set a recurring reminder in the meetings-channel so that every week a different person (rotating through all the people in the company) has the duty of being meeting-master – with the name of the person who is meeting master that week in the message.

the obstacle:

Setting recurring reminders in Slack via the /remind is a pain. (I know the task is possible to set up with the vanilla /remind command, but it always takes me quite a while to figure out the right syntax after not using the command for a year.)

the occasion:

Every two weeks everyone at discoverize has the opportunity to use a few hours for somthing “funky”.

the path + the solution:

At first I thought I would program a .NET Core application which sends messages to Slack at the appriopriate times with the appropriate person as meeting-master. Then my toughts wandered to background tasks (which right now we also use in a different service). And I found Hangfire which would persist the tasks for me, making my life easier – on the downside of using a third-party app.

I already started to look into our Slack apps to create a new one (to follow this tutorial), but then realized that there probably already are Slack apps out there doing a better job of helping to create recurring reminders. And since my time was already dwindeling away, I just searched and compared apps. I landed on RemindUs, installed it to our Slack and started using it. It seems to do the job well enough. Task accomplished.

update:

After testing out RemindUs it did not suit our use case well. It did not convert a @user statement in a message to an alert to that user. Furthermore the layout and text was that of a reminder (of course) which felt weird. We just want a message to appear repeatedly as if it was just entered by a bot/user.

I researched other Slack Apps, but only paid ones did the thing I needed. And for this simple usage I do not want to pay a monthly amount of 6 Dollars or more.

So I reverted to vanilla Slack and the /remind command. Here is the usage in our use case:

/remind #_meetings "@anton - you are meeting master this week" on 08.05.2023 every five weeks

And then setting up this reminder for every team member in meeting master rotation one week apart.

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