All aboard!

First impressions are important. We've seen more and more people using incident.io recently, which has been fun to see, so we've used this influx of new faces as a prompt to think about what we could do better here.

We're currently focussing on onboarding and adoption to make it easier for new users of incident.io to get up to speed, whether that's when you install us, or the first time you're pulled into an incident.

We'll have more to show next week, but we've already made a start, so you'll probably notice a few changes. If you spot them, let us know what you think!

What we shipped

• 🆕 When you install incident.io to your workspace, you now get a much clearer message that tells you what we've done, and what you should do next.
• 🆕 When you join the #incidents channel for the first time, we now introduce ourselves, and tell you what the channel is for. We do this privately, of course.
• 🆕 If you want to automatically have a call attached to your incident at kickoff, you can! Some folks have a consistent call always at the ready, and now we'll automatically add it to your incident for you (thanks to Bud for suggesting this!)
• 🆕 Fed up of typing /incident to kick off an incident? Too many characters and you're falling asleep by the end? Well, you can now type /inc to save you time, and effort.
• 🆕 Keen readers of The Changelog will have noticed we're starting to experiment with slash commands in incident channels. This week, we added support for a bunch of commands, including close, recap, statuspage and escalate. Try /incident recap for a quick spin!
• 💅 If you escalate using Opsgenie, we'll now stream updates into the channel for you.
• 💅 If you created an incident with /incident The website is down, we used to ignore The website is down and make you type it again. We now automatically populate that into the modal, to save energy for your precious little fingers. Thanks Ravelin, Bud and many others for this feedback!
• 👷🏽‍♀️ Our backend application is currently one large program, and we hope it stays that way. We're making some improvements to how we structure it to improve speed of development, reliability and correctness.
• 👷🏽‍♀️ We invested a bit of time in our build and deployment pipeline - getting it down from 10m to a far healthier 2m, every second counts!
• 🐛 If you logged in to app.incident.io on multiple Slack workspaces, you'd sometimes see an error when we thought you'd installed the app in a workspace, when you had not. We've now fixed that!
• 🐛 The biggest lie that software engineers tell themselves is that "we'll do pagination later". We uttered these words when building our PagerDuty integration to show you the list of services, and unfortunately, you were limited to 25. We implemented pagination, and now there are no limits!