Introduction to the Course

What is Slack?

Slack is a communication application. It can help us connect with employees, customers, and partners. It allows teams to collaborate with images, videos and voice messages. It also allows huddles across teams, time zones, and physical spaces. The Slack APIAPI stands for Application Programming Interface and acts as an intermediary that passes information back and forth between two programs. has allowed it to become a highly integrated tool that fits well with other commonly used software like Jira and Google Calendar. By following this course, you can make your application more integrated by incorporating Slack’s API. If you want to integrate your application with the Slack API, this is the course for you.

Slack API

The Slack API helps automate repetitive tasks by providing programmatic access to Slack’s functionality. Slack also has excellent documentation with a built-in tool to test the individual endpointsWhen communicating with a service like Slack, an “endpoint” is one end of the communication. In this case, it’s a URL like “slack.com/api/chat.meMessage”..

By the end of this course, you should be able to have a firm grip on Slack’s web API.

Course prerequisites

The course prerequisites include basic knowledge of Python and its Requests library. This course is for developers who want to quickly get used to the Slack API and use it in their applications.

What is this course about?

We’ll cover the Slack Web API, and explore the individual endpoints in this course. In the end, we’ll briefly learn about Bolt for Python—a framework provided by Slack.

We’ll explore the groups of endpoints given below:

1. Chat
2. Conversations
3. Files
4. Users
5. Reactions

We’ll use the Bolt for Python framework to create a small polling application that initiates polls in channels, takes suggestions from the channel members, and then counts and shows votes on the poll.