January 2022 Summaries

Axolo has released a product update that includes emoji reactions on PR status, disabling Slackbot notifications, and improved engineer search. Emojis are used to represent the status of pull requests, such as draft, wip, reviewable, mergeable, closed, or merged. Users can activate this feature in their settings. Additionally, users can now disable Slackbot notifications when a pull request is closed by having each engineer sign in on Axolo with Slack. Lastly, the app has made it easier to search through team members and will delete unnecessary notifications within PR channels for cleaner conversations.

This article presents four Chief Technology Officer (CTO) blogs that offer valuable insights on technical and non-technical subjects. The first blog is by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, who writes about building scalable and robust distributed systems, AWS strategy, and tech predictions. Will Larson's blog focuses on his experience as an engineering manager, systems design, CTO advice, and technical writing. Erik Bern's blog covers high-level topics related to data, while Tom MacWright shares his philosophical thoughts and opinions frequently. Additionally, the article includes a bonus CTO article by Bryan Helmig discussing the journey of a small startup CTO and another by Miguel Carranza on the differences between VP Of Engineering and CTO roles.

The article discusses six top Slack GitLab merge request integrations to enhance tech teams' productivity. These include Axolo for collaboration, CodeDog for easy setup, Eleminder for free pull request reminders, Zapier and Integromat for customization, Nazhryn's open-source integration, and the official Slack GitLab integration for issue management. Each integration has its unique features, benefits, and drawbacks, allowing teams to choose based on their specific needs. By integrating these tools, teams can improve communication, streamline processes, and ensure everyone stays on the same page.

Axolo has released several updates including pull request reminders, statuses, analytics, and improved notifications. Pull requests can now be reminded from Slack channels, and their statuses are updated to reflect the actions needed. Analytics provide weekly summaries of pull requests, while mergeability checks send notifications after each commit or when a check fails. Axolo has also fixed issues with duplicate messages and started Jira integration. Notification formatting for issue and code comments in Slack has been improved as well.