How Dropbox is moving from AI tools that assist engineers to agentic systems that can execute scoped tasks, and how we’re building platforms to support those workflows.
#developer-productivity
14 posts
28 May
21 Apr
Every iOS pull request at Thumbtack used to wait 30 to 40 minutes for Continuous Integration (CI) — sometimes over an hour on Fridays. We built Smart Test Selection (STS) to cut that in half. Here’s how. I’m a Senior Software Engineer on the iOS Infrastructure team. We own the CI/CD pipelines, build tooling, and shared frameworks that keep Thumbtack’s…
16 Mar
What agriculture and car manufacturing can teach us about the use of generative AI in software engineering It’s not often that an article about AI coding tools takes us back a few centuries. Come with me on a trip down memory lane to revisit a couple of lessons other industries learned long ago. In the 1840s, the German chemist Justus…
11 Feb
From Claude Code to Cursor, we're big adopters of AI coding tools at Dropbox. The early results have been promising, but there are still a lot of open questions about how to work with these tools most effectively and where they can have the most impact. To push this conversation forward, we hosted an executive roundtable at our San Francisco…
14 Apr 2025
In the world of DevOps and Developer Experience (DevXP), speed and efficiency can make a big difference on an engineer’s day-to-day tasks. Today, we’ll dive into how Slack’s DevXP team took some existing tools and used them to optimize an end-to-end (E2E) testing pipeline. This lowered build times and reduced redundant processes, saving both time…
22 May 2024
Balancing Old Tricks with New Feats: AI-Powered Conversion From Enzyme to React Testing Library at Slack
SlackUpdate (October 2024): In response to numerous requests from external developers, we have open-sourced a version of our Enzyme to React Testing Library (RTL) conversion tool. You can now find it on npm, along with detailed instructions on how to integrate and use it in your projects. In the world of frontend development, one thing remains…
26 Apr 2023
Ready to take your engineering ship to Warp 9? (by Christopher Chiu-Tabet) Nowadays, everyone is examining how to increase efficiencies and cut costs to improve their bottom line. Although it may seem counterintuitive, engineering managers can help increase efficiencies by investing in tools for their engineering group that can help increase the team’s velocity and therefore increase efficiencies and the…
12 Oct 2022
At Slack, the goal of the Mobile Developer Experience Team (DevXp) is to empower developers to ship code with confidence while enjoying a pleasant and productive engineering experience. We use metrics and surveys to measure productivity and developer experience, such as developer sentiment, CI stability, time to merge (TTM), and test failure rate. We have…
31 Aug 2022
Our build platform is an essential piece of delivering code to production efficiently and safely at Slack. Over time it has undergone a lot of changes, and in 2021 the Build team started looking at the long-term vision. Some questions the Build team wanted to answer were: When should we invest in modernizing our build…
19 Aug 2022
What happens when your distributed service has challenges with stampeding herds of internal requests? How do you prevent cascading failures between internal services? How might you re-architect your workflows when naive horizontal or vertical scaling reaches their respective limits? These were the challenges facing Slack engineers during their day-to-day development workflows in 2020. Multiple internal…
21 Jul 2022
Every codebase starts off small and modern. While it’s still small, the team can easily keep it up-to-date with current standards, upgrade libraries, and handle any code hygiene issues that may arise. Updating the API of a framework you built is easy when it’s only called in a handful of places. However, as the codebase…
28 Jun 2022
In this article, “remote development environments” refer to AWS EC2 instances where engineers make code changes and can see a running Slack application with those changes. For years, engineers at Slack isolated and tested their changes by running microcosms of the Slack application on their local computers. This was difficult for many reasons: it involved…
5 Apr 2022
At Slack, the goal of the Mobile Developer Experience Team (DevXp) is to empower developers to ship code with confidence while enjoying a pleasant and productive engineering experience. We use metrics and surveys to measure productivity and developer experience, such as developer sentiment, CI stability, time to merge (TTM), and test failure rate. The DevXp…
7 Oct 2021
Slack is an integral part of where work happens for teams across the world, and our work in the Core Development Engineering department supports engineers throughout Slack that develop, build, test, and release high-quality services to Slack’s customers. In this article, we share how teams at Slack evolved our internal tooling and made infrastructure bets.…