June 2023 Summaries

Highlight has introduced improvements to its network request visualization features, aimed at helping users better understand client-server interactions and troubleshoot user experience and performance issues. The updates include refined access and viewing capabilities in the developer tools, allowing users to filter requests by type or status code and perform custom searches. A new panel consolidates related information such as metadata, errors, and logs for each network request, providing a comprehensive view of request activities. Highlight plans to continue enhancing its offerings, with future features expected to further aid users in understanding interactions from client processes through to the database.

Highlight has introduced Harold, an AI assistant designed to enhance their observability platform by assisting users in error resolution and session analysis. Harold offers guidance on fixing application errors by analyzing error details such as titles, language, and stack traces, although it cannot yet write code. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on Harold's suggestions to aid in its improvement. Additionally, Harold can summarize long user sessions to quickly identify key actions, and these insights are included in a new weekly email digest to highlight unexpected usage patterns. Highlight plans to expand Harold's capabilities based on user feedback and continues to roll out updates to improve error management and session analysis.

Highlight transitioned from using Hygraph to GitHub as a headless CMS for managing their blog content, resulting in significantly improved build times and enhanced collaboration. By storing blog posts as markdown files directly in their GitHub repository, they eliminated the need for multiple API calls, reducing build times to approximately two seconds regardless of the number of posts. This shift also enabled engineers to utilize GitHub's features like pull requests, issues, and projects for better organization and collaboration, allowing the entire team to review and contribute to content effectively. The new workflow involved using Next.js and next-mdx-remote for rendering markdown, alongside gray-matter for parsing metadata, aligning with Highlight's open-source values while improving developer experience and operational efficiency.