ZULIP ECONOMY

Jonni Bidwell talks to Tim Abbott about how a printer notification protocol combined with a kernel patching  mechanism led to the Zulip chat program.

- Jonni Bidwell

Tim Abbott has something of an impressive resumé, holding no less than three degrees from M.I.T. He was a founding member of the Ksplice project, which gave system administrators the luxury of rebootless kernel updates.

After that was acquired by Oracle he and a few other Ksplice people formed Zulip in 2012. Zulip is an instant messaging system with a difference. It has all the best bits of Slack, IRC, and email and a whole bunch of features of its own (including /LaTeX support). It was acquired by Dropbox in 2014 and now is completely open-source. Impressively, Zulip attracts regular contributions from people outside of the core team.

Occasionally at LXF Remote Towers, we’re forced to join a Slack channel to receive the latest company news. And on the whole, the experience involves being bombarded with irrelevant messages, memes we don’t understand, and cat pictures, while our web browsers grind to a halt as the web app devours ever more resources. Email doesn’t work for group conversations. And Slack doesn’t make it easy to catch up on messages. Even if you’ve only been gone for a few hours. Zulip solves this by threading messages in each channel according to the topic. So even employees' pet pictures can be categorized.

Tim is also the founder of Kandra Labs, whose mission is to financially sustain Zulip through hosted offerings and support, as well as to provide leadership. He was good enough to join Jonni via videolink from San Francisco and tell us more about Zulip, which we’re now actively lobbying management to adopt.