Somewhat predictably, a few internal cracks were starting to show in the desktop client’s foundation. Today, after more than half a decade of hyper-growth, Slack is used by millions of people with larger companies working with more data than we ever could have imagined when we first started. During this period, we were optimizing for product-market fit and in a constant sprint to keep up with our customers as their use - and expectations - of the product grew. The desktop version of Slack is our oldest client, growing out of a period of rapid development and experimentation during the earliest moments of our company. Still, software codebases have life spans. And running code knows things: hard-won knowledge gained through billions of hours of cumulative usage and tens of thousands of bug fixes. Time spent rewriting something that already works is time that won’t be spent making our customers working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never rewrite your code from scratch, and that’s good advice.
