I’ve used a Stream Deck as an integral part of my personal and work desk setup for over three years. I bought my first one, a Stream Deck+, on a whim, because it had knobs, and I thought the buttons seemed cool. I’m not a streamer, and this blog is the only “content” I create, so I’m far from the target customer, but it’s become a critical productivity tool for me.

My Warm Handoffs post generated a lot of activity. Before I had shared it, a former coworker happened to find it via a Google search for “Warm Handoffs Slack.” A few people reposted it on LinkedIn, and someone I don’t know at all shared it on Hacker News, where it briefly reached number 7 on the homepage. Several people told me they shared it with their teams to implement the practice.

Warm Handoffs are a procedure I’ve implemented with several teams and organizations to improve communication and collaboration in Slack. As organizations grow and ownership shifts and splits as teams are formed and re-formed, Slack channels proliferate, and it gets harder for folks across an org to know the right channel to get help for a particular problem. This often leads to someone asking a question of the team they think is right then being redirected to another team and channel (sometimes more than once).

I’m a big fan of Vercel’s deployment model, but I don’t do frontend work, so I’ve never really had a reason to play with it. Enter Hugo, which Vercel also supports, and which I’ve been planning to try for a tech blog. Getting Started Vercel makes it very easy to bootstrap a Hugo project. You can create a new repo based on a sample Hugo project directly from the admin UI.