June 2017 Summaries

The Sentry team is working to improve the day-to-day workflow of their platform by enhancing two concepts: resolution and silence. The silencing feature allows users to ignore issues until an impact threshold is hit, focusing on specific subjects such as number of occurrences or unique users affected. Resolution within releases enables users to mark issues as resolved with a higher degree of accuracy, including options for resolving in the current release or an explicit release, and commit annotations that ensure absolute correctness by correlating changesets with deployments. These improvements aim to improve issue triage and provide better visibility into triaged issues, with plans to integrate with code reviews and third-party tools.

The Python Debugger (PDB) is a powerful tool that allows developers to step through their call stack using breakpoints. By adding a breakpoint to a specific function, developers can pause execution and examine the current state of the program. The PDB console provides a shell-like environment where developers can run most Python code, access locally scoped variables, and navigate up or down the call stack as needed. In production environments, Python's CPython runtime allows easy access to the current call stack via `sys.exc_info()`, which returns a tuple containing information about the exception, including the class of the exception, the actual instance of the exception, and a traceback object. The traceback object can be used to extract stack locals, allowing developers to understand the context and resolve issues more easily. By leveraging these tools and features, developers can gain valuable insights into their program's execution and fix errors more efficiently.

Forge is a 2-day event in Napa Valley that brings together software developers to discuss the future of building and using software. The conference aims to help teams rapidly iterate on product while focusing on observability, agility, and user-friendliness. It will feature a single track of technical content covering topics such as microservices, automation, continuous deployment, and more. A diverse range of speakers from well-known companies like Stripe, MailChimp, Honeycomb, LightStep, and Zeit have been confirmed for the event. The conference is expected to attract around 200 attendees and registration is now open, with early registration encouraged to ensure diversity and plan according to demand.

The Sentry team is making changes to increase the reliability of sentry.io by updating its IP addresses, which may require customer-side updates to firewall rules for uninterrupted service. The new IP addresses will be used starting on June 21, 2017, and customers with existing network rules will need to update them to include these new addresses to ensure continued functionality. To alleviate the pains caused by this change, Sentry provides an alternative authentication method using a token that can be appended to outbound requests, allowing for more flexibility in security settings.

Sentry welcomes James Andrews as its first intern, who will be joining the operations team to work on Freight, a service that enhances the deploy process. James is currently studying computer science at San Francisco State University and has previously worked as a customer support engineer at Bootstrap Themes. He is expected to bring his skills and experience to Sentry during his summer internship.

The new Java SDK, sentry-java, is a major refactoring of the previous raven-java client, aiming to add first-class support for features like breadcrumbs and integrations beyond logging frameworks. The SDK takes a simple and re-usable approach, focusing on a straightforward Java client that also implements logging integrations. It introduces a new static API, allowing users to easily record breadcrumbs, set the current user, and send events without managing their own client instance. The SDK is particularly well-suited for Android applications, automatically attaching useful information to events such as device details and network connectivity. The new SDK is open-source on GitHub and available for free or open-source use.

Sentry has expanded its employee giving program through its partnership with Bright Funds, allowing all employees to access the platform and donate to various organizations. This move aligns with Sentry's core values of working hard on a great product while giving back to the community and the world. Employees can now choose from a range of organizations to support, either through recurring or one-time donations, and track the impact of their contributions. The program aims to empower and encourage employees to make a positive difference in the world.