Did you know that you lose more than half your day to context switching between apps?

It's not just you. It's all of us.

But developers experience this more than most, and context switching is even more costly because of the deep work that comes from making 0s and 1s do cool stuff!

When am I context switching?

Context switching happens all the time when communicating with your team about tasks and issues. You're constantly going from Slack to GitHub and back, copying and pasting links, comments, etc.

🙋 How many of these have you found yourself doing just today?

• Asked a coworker to review your PR
• Escalating an issue that is blocking you
• Let your teammate know you finished reviewing their PR
• Posted in #engineering to see if anyone else is running into the same failing test
• Getting team buy in on implementation details

And because GitHub and email notifications are noisy, we can't rely on them to our coworkers know when something needs their attention, so we tend to go from GitHub to Slack to get someone's attention.

From GitHub to Slack with a click

If you're thinking "there's gotta be a better way", you're right.  

Using PixieBrix, you can build a custom web clipper extension for GitHub to Slack.

PixieBrix is a browser extension that can interact with the page, meaning you can do things like add a button on GitHub issues and PRs: 

And then create the automation that happens when anyone clicks that button.

For instance, maybe you want to ask the user for a note, or go ahead and post the important context to Slack right away with a click. 

And when we say that you can customize it to do anything you want, we mean it! PixieBrix has thousands of bricks (like steps) for different actions from scraping the page, looking up information in other tools, conditional flows, showing modals, inserting HTML on the page, and more.

You can even create custom paths that let the user choose their adventure (or you could ask AI to make a decision based on the context). 

These GitHub to Slack nudges save developers time, helps them stay in the tool, and even prevents frustrating double work.

 

"Our GitHub nudges button helps us coordinate PR reviews across the pool of potential reviewers and avoid repeated work. It not only pings slack to notify the author when someone starts a review, but it add a custom "@so-and-so is reviewing this" label to the PR in GitHub itself so we can see when that PR is already being covered by someone else without having to tediously check-in with people in slack."

 

~ Misha Holtz, Software Engineer @ PixieBrix

Ready to build your custom GitHub to Slack extension?

Get started with our Slack Integration and customize your actions for adding buttons, modals, and extracting content from GitHub. Need help building? You can reach out via the live chat button or join our developer community.