May 2020 Summaries

Earlier this year, the team was invited to Thredup's office in Oakland to participate in their quarterly Hackathon, which was uniquely focused on instrumentation and monitoring rather than developing new features. Participants were challenged to improve their understanding and use of tools such as Rollbar, Pagerduty, and Datadog over a three-day event that began with learning sessions and continued with practical applications. As part of the Customer Success Program, a training session led by a Solutions Engineer provided comprehensive insights into Rollbar, addressing topics like noise reduction, custom grouping, and workflow optimization. The training aimed to help teams achieve "Rollbar Zero," where there are no unacknowledged items, ultimately enhancing coding performance and workflow clarity. The session was well-received, with active participation and significant progress reported by Thredup teams, including an 80% reduction in active Rollbar items by one team and the integration of JIRA for streamlined task assignment. The event highlighted the importance of practical application alongside theoretical learning, and the team expressed a willingness to collaborate on similar events in the future.

Rollbar has introduced a new GitHub Action that integrates with GitHub Actions to streamline the process of sending deployment information to Rollbar, enhancing visibility and error management within CI/CD pipelines. This integration allows teams to automatically notify Rollbar of new deploys, link deploy information to specific versions, and gain insights into the changes, individuals involved, environments affected, and any new errors generated. By providing detailed code context and enabling users to see new or reactivated errors associated with specific versions, the Rollbar Deploy GitHub Action facilitates more frequent and reliable code releases. The action can be set up directly from the GitHub Action marketplace, and Rollbar's GitHub integration also includes features like Git blame, which helps identify the last person to edit code that caused an error. This integration aims to improve the deployment process, allowing for more efficient error response and ultimately enhancing the customer experience.