New Slack add-on will surely ruin your coworkers’ day
Slack is a powerful tool, and with great power comes the great responsibility...to screw with your coworkers.
A new Slack add-on from programmer Will Leinweber does just that, in pretty much the most diabolical way possible. Essentially, whenever anyone else starts typing it shows them a message that you, too, happen to be typing. And when they stop? That message goes away.
You see the problem — or, rather, the opportunity.
"I made a VGP (very good program) that makes it so it looks like I'm typing on Slack whenever anyone else is typing, and stops when they stop," he tweeted out along with a video of the program in action. "Everyone loves it so far and doesn't find it annoying at all!"
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Leinweber helpfully uploaded said program to Github, so the madness can spread. We're sure offices around the world are thanking him as you read this.
We reached out to Leinweber in an attempt to find out just what, exactly, inspired this broadside against all societal norms of workplace decency, but have received no response as of press time.
But we expect to hear back from him at any moment. After all, we can plainly see that Will Leinweber is typing.
UPDATE: April 26, 2018, 11:40 a.m. PDT: Leinweber did, indeed, get back to us, and shared some of the project's backstory.
"I've been making small, fun little things like this for a long time," he told Mashable over email. "An older one that is one of my favorites is 'redirect blame' [...] which you can use as your error page to make people think their internet connection is down instead of your site."
"It actually came together in like 10 minutes," he added. "I thought it'd take much longer, but the libraries I used had all the hard work done, it was just a matter of piecing things together."
Notably, Leinweber explained that while the code is all up on Github, it's not exactly plug and play — "It's probably not easy for non-programmers as it stands." Which, honestly, is probably for the best.
