DEV Community

Gabriel Reimers for Coding Friends UG

Posted on

Macarons — Building a chat roulette app for Slack

Last year we tapped into building Slack apps.
Our first project was our decision record app Loqbooq. And while building a Slack app looks simple on first glimpse, it turned out to be very challenging. Especially user management and shared channels caused a lot of headache for us.

When we had finally achieved building and releasing our first Slack app, we thought it would be much easier to build another one based on that.

And so we did.

Within just a few weeks we build Macarons, a chat roulette app to connect teams.

We know there are already quite a few chat roulette apps for Slack like Donut, Snack or Hallway.

But we found those either too complicated, too expensive, or missing important features.

Macarons is simple to setup but at the same time comes with some neat features that make chat roulettes more fun for everybody:

🧁 Quick and Easy
Just add the Macarons app to a Slack channel and it will automatically pair off random members for (virtual) coffees.

🎰 Control the Odds
For each channel you can control how often and when chat lotteries happen, as well as how many people should be matched together.

🧊 Ice Breakers
Let Macarons get conversations started with predefined ice breakers or set your own custom topics for each round.

🏖 Take a skip day
Independent of a channels meeting interval, each user can always individually pause their participation or decide to only take part every other time.

You can try Macarons for free and we really appreciate any feedback:

macarons-roulette.app

Top comments (0)