January 2017 Summaries

Bill Lapcevic has joined Sentry as COO. He brings experience from New Relic where he built and led various teams including Business Development and Customer Success, Support, Education, and Renewals. As COO at Sentry, Bill will help set the direction for the business side of the company. In his personal life, Bill enjoys spending time with his family and pursuing hobbies such as fly fishing and singing in an a cappella group.

Breadcrumbs Come to Node.js` The Sentry team has released a new feature called breadcrumbs for Node.js, which provides a trail of events leading up to a captured error, adding critical context that can help with debugging. The implementation was challenging due to Node's asynchronous nature and cooperative concurrency model, but the result is an API more closely resembling the browser JavaScript client, with automatic breadcrumb support joining clients in other languages. To get started, users can install the latest version of Raven-node and initialize the client library with automatic breadcrumbs enabled, which will record a handful of useful breadcrumbs by default, including HTTP requests, log statements, and PostgreSQL queries. Users can also record custom breadcrumbs to track major steps in their request handling pipeline or associate data that's particularly useful for debugging. The Node client library's middleware for Express error monitoring ensures that breadcrumbs captured in route handlers or middleware are associated with the correct request. The Sentry team is seeking feedback and suggestions on how to improve and expand the feature, with plans to tie automatic breadcrumbs into more database drivers and enable them by default in the future.

Sentry provides controls to filter out quirky errors from older browsers, allowing developers to focus on real bugs and avoid wasting time and money tracking them. The company has added more granular customization to these filters, enabling users to specify which browser versions to track or ignore. This feature is accessible in project settings under the inbound filters section, where it can help teams prioritize their debugging efforts.

We are excited to welcome Sam Warburg to our growth team, where he will drive business development and delight customers as an early addition to Sentry from Dropbox's enterprise sales team. With his experience in helping customers sync their data to the cloud, Sam is well-positioned to make a positive impact at Sentry. Outside of work, Sam enjoys spending time with his family and exploring the outdoors.

In 2016, Sentry experienced significant growth, expanding its team from two members to 25 while increasing its user base to hundreds of thousands of developers. The company focused on enhancing its product offerings and support for various programming languages, including JavaScript, PHP, and iOS. Additionally, Sentry introduced new features such as Workflow Notifications, Breadcrumbs, User Feedback, Multi-Factor Auth, Privacy Shield, and updated pricing plans to better serve developers' needs. The company aims to continue refining its product offerings and challenging the status quo in software development while remaining accessible and fair for all users.