Slack Behind the Scenes: Overcoming Key Challenges to Craft a Seamless Mobile App
Article Summary
Tracy Stampfli from Slack reveals how her infrastructure team keeps 120+ mobile engineers shipping features without breaking the app. The secret? Treating mobile connectivity like a first-class problem, not an afterthought.
Slack's mobile infrastructure team faces a unique challenge: desktop users have stable WiFi, but mobile users jump between networks, lose signal in subways, and expect everything to just work. Tracy Stampfli, Principal Software Engineer, shares how her team of elite engineers built the backbone that powers Slack's mobile experience across all feature teams.
Key Takeaways
- API request prioritization ensures critical data loads first under poor connectivity
- Object versioning validates cached data freshness, dramatically reducing unnecessary data fetching
- Feature flags and server-controlled toggles enable instant rollbacks before customers notice issues
- Common offline-first component lets any team save user actions until connectivity returns
- Team scaled from technical debt chaos to supporting 120+ engineers with consistent architecture
Slack's mobile infrastructure team turned intermittent connectivity from a liability into a solved problem by prioritizing requests, versioning cached data, and building reusable offline-first components.
