Josh Johnson
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Hey, I’m Josh! I’m a founding engineer at Alpine and love working on things that make people’s lives easier. I’m from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan but am now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I love experimenting with tech and wearing a ton of (metaphorical) hats.
Writing
My year abandoning Slack, Notion, and Linear for Alpine
What it’s like to leave tool soup behind for an all‑in‑one workspace
by Josh Johnson - February 25, 2026
After almost a year of living in Alpine, a few themes stand out:
I spend less time acting as the glue between separate tools.
Conversations, documents, and tasks actually feel like different views on the same work, not different worlds I have to translate between.
It’s easier to stay in flow, because more of what I need is already in the place where I’m working.
I haven’t felt like I’ve lost anything important from my previous tools. If anything, I’ve gained a stronger sense of coherence in my work.
I’ve spent most of my career living inside a mess of different productivity tools.
At different companies, the exact stack changed - Slack or Teams, Notion or Confluence, Jira or Linear. The feeling was always the same: my work was scattered across tabs, my conversations were detached from the documents and tasks they referenced, and I was doing a lot of manual glue work just to keep everything straight.
Almost a year ago, I moved my workday into Alpine (although a bit through a forcing function - I work here!). Since then, I haven’t missed that old tool soup at all.
This is what it’s been like to spend a year working inside one integrated workspace, why I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything by leaving my previous tools behind, and why I think this way of working is where productivity is headed.
Life before Alpine: fragmentation as a feature
In previous roles, I bounced between different combinations of tools: Slack plus Notion, or Teams plus Confluence, plus Jira or Linear for tasks. I’ve been through a few migrations, too. We’d switch from one wiki to another, or from one task system to something “better.”
In what they’ve set out to do, all of those tools did their jobs well.
Chat apps were great at real-time communication. Docs tools were great at storing and sharing documents. Task tools were great at tracking work. But they didn’t really talk to each other in a way that felt natural.
There was always a moment where I’d ask myself:
Where does this live now?
Is that doc in the old system or the new one?
Did we capture that decision in chat, in a doc, or in some Jira comment thread?
Even when we tried to “integrate” everything (cross-linking between apps, adding bots, wiring up webhooks), it always felt like a patch. The burden was still on me and my teammates to remember which link belonged where, and to mentally stitch together a story out of scattered tools. I’ve always loved efficiency and collaboration. I genuinely enjoy the work I do, and I get a lot of energy from working with coworkers toward a shared goal. But that fragmentation chipped away at the parts of work I love most.
When your tools don’t fit together, you end up spending a lot of time being the router instead of being the contributor.
Why integration became my thing
Looking back, I’ve been circling this problem for a long time.
At previous jobs, whenever we had hackdays (all day experiments to try to create something novel), I almost always gravitated toward building integrations. Given a free day or two to work on anything