But whether the company you work for use Slack or not, you can still use the tool to connect and stay in touch with other professionals like you. The design and tech communities have been creating a series of groups to chat about references, events, books, links, case studies and best practices in our field. The best part: anyone can join and participate in the discussions.

Here are some of my favorites Slack groups:

UI/UX designers from all over the globe

Conversations on web and UI animation

Designers and researchers from around the world discussing user experience

A community for Sketch designers

A channel to help junior UX designers across the world find a job

A community to help you figure out your next steps in becoming a better designer from folks a few steps ahead of you

For digital nomads working on startups

A place to share side project ideas and find other people to join

A community for designers, PMs, and developers

A community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier

For people who are interested in the user experience of content

An active community of creatives to learn, share and grow with

To rid the world of confusing, hard-to-use interactions and interfaces through quality design education

From the creators of the homonym user testing tool

A curated community where photographers can share and meet great people who also enjoy photography

All the things relevant to product management

A community for creative developers to share knowledge

A Slack community for iOS developers to share experiences and learn

Slack group with ReactJS news

A group about application hosting on Google’s infrastructure

Official Slack group for the Bootstrap framework

A safe, confidential space for women who work in technology

Artists, journalists, educators, tinkerers, bot enthusiasts and seasoned developers who love to make bots

Developers of Slack bots on Slack

Artificial Intelligence group on Slack

Slack group of people from sub-reddit /Entrepreneur

Group with independent game developers

A community for gamers to chat and play video games…and cat GIFs