August 2015 Summaries

Sentry 8 is rolling out this week, introducing a new look and feel, powerful error monitoring features including release tracking, user assignment, event merging, and more, with the goal of having all users on version 8 by September.

The Redis parallelization toolkit, initially using Nydus, was replaced by a new library called rb (Redis Blaster) due to performance issues with threading in the previous implementation. The new approach uses a select loop for parallel query execution and eliminates locking, resulting in higher performance. Additionally, the routing layer was improved to support correct behavior and prevent potentially bad uses of Nydus in codebases. The new library offers a simplified API with explicit promise objects, making it easier to reason about and reducing errors. rb is available under the Apache 2 License and has shown noticeable impact on performance, even for less operation-intensive endpoints.

Sentry is opening its new version 8 beta to the public after nearly 18 months of exploration and modernization. The beta is an early release candidate made up of over 2,000 individual commits and will be available at beta.sentry.io for Sentry customers. The new version features a brand new design, faster rendering, improved release tracking, assignment, event merging, and many other changes. While the beta is considered stable, users should expect some display issues and may not see everything running smoothly immediately. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on the new release through GitHub's public issue tracker. The Sentry team will continue to work hard to improve and refine their platform to provide the best possible experience for developers and teams.

The Sentry documentation has been consolidated into a single, central location at docs.sentry.io, improving ease of access and bug tracking workflow integration with other tools in the stack. The documentation was previously scattered across various Open Source projects, making it challenging to find relevant information. To address this issue, Sentry unified its documentation using Sphinx, a documentation tool that was extended to meet specific needs. The new system includes features such as customizable sidebar navigation, dynamic elements like authentication status and API key information, and wizards for guided setup processes. The documentation is built from individual component repositories, with a push hook synchronizing changes to the master repository, and is shipped with the Sentry server tarballs.

Ben Vinegar has joined the engineering team at Sentry as a member of their JavaScript development team, bringing his expertise to improve user experience and enhance reporting client raven-js. He is well-known for his work in third-party JavaScript and front-end engineering at Disqus, where Sentry's early development took place. The Sentry team looks forward to Ben's contributions and invites him to connect with them on Twitter or GitHub.