October 2017 Summaries

Empathy is crucial in the workplace and communication, not just a nice-to-have, as it can make a significant difference in team motivation, collaboration, and overall outcomes. Attending the Transform Track at DockerCon EU exposed the author to inspiring talks on empathy, highlighting its importance in effective communication, collaboration, and software development. Speakers like Lauri Apple and Nirmal Mehta emphasized that empathy is not an emotion but a skill that can be developed over time, and it's essential for creating a positive and productive work environment. By being empathetic towards users, co-workers, and even strangers, individuals can avoid conflict, promote collaboration, and optimize the benefits of human interaction.

Probot`, a GitHub App framework, was discovered by Sentry after they created their own `Grooming Bot` for managing repositories, but found Probot's implementation more elegant and efficient. They refactored their code to use Probot, which provided features like automatic authentication, event webhooks, and extensibility. To make Probot work in their production environment, they created a "development app" with limited access rights, used the `DRY_RUN` environment variable for testing, and set up Sentry integration. They also developed a configuration system called `probot-config` to manage settings across multiple repositories. Additionally, they built two bots, `Momos` and `Eos`, which use Probot's features to automate tasks like comment cleaning and email reminders. The team is actively contributing to Probot's development and improvement, with plans to address limitations such as rate limiting and centralized configuration for organizations. By using Probot, Sentry was able to streamline their workflow and reduce repetitive tasks, making it a valuable tool for automating GitHub-related tasks.

Sean Tilley is a professional with experience in crowdfunding and open source communities. He has worked at BackerKit for four years, assisting major Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns with data collection, crowd management, and logistics. Previously, he served as the Community Manager for Diaspora*. Sean is also an avid user of GNU/Linux since his early teenage years and currently chronicles the evolution of decentralized communication in his publication, We Distribute.

If you're a student looking to gain hands-on experience in software development, Sentry is providing free access as part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack, offering unlimited projects and members, 500,000 events per month, and support for educational institutions. This partnership aims to give students an edge when entering the job market by familiarizing them with industry tools like Digital Ocean, GitHub, Travis CI, Datadog, and Sentry. By providing free access to Sentry, the company hopes to empower students to build better applications and introduce more efficient development processes, ultimately making them a valuable asset in the tech industry.

Sentry's collaboration with Datadog aims to streamline error tracking by capturing and aggregating software exceptions, automating their monitoring, tracking, and recognition. This integration enables teams to observe and operationalize cloud and microservices infrastructures more effectively. By correlating errors with metrics and data points from other systems, creating synthetic error dashboards, and searching for errors and bug fixes, developers can gain a better understanding of unusual issues and save time detecting future spikes. The process of integrating Sentry with Datadog is straightforward, requiring only a few minutes to complete by following simple steps.

This post discusses how to use Jekyll and Jest to maintain a consistent style and tone in a blog, where each author's voice is an important part of the content. The author provides a suite of copy-editor-style tests with Jest for their blog, which is generated by Jekyll. They outline five steps to achieve this: exposing Jekyll data, reporting which posts fail, enforcing a style guide, selectively testing posts, and configuring CI to support modified post tests. The author also shares additional ideas for tests, such as checking for overused phrases or excessive emojis in blog posts. By following these steps, developers can create a robust testing system that helps maintain consistency across their blog content.

Welcome Brianna Fore to the Sentry Team! Brianna Fore is joining the Sentry Team from CoreOS, bringing a background of accounting expertise and experience in helping teams manage their finances effectively. She also enjoys spending time outdoors and playing old-school video games.

We've migrated our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) without downtime, successfully handling unpredictable demand and meeting the needs of our error tracking service, Sentry. We learned that it's all about meeting unpredictable demand, building a bridge rather than crossing it, and minimizing infrastructure changes. The migration was made possible by treating GCP as a hardware provider, giving them money for machines to connect to and configure, and focusing on building the bridge rather than rebuilding Sentry. After a successful transition, we were able to cut our infrastructure costs by roughly 20% and explore new features that GCP provides in hopes of adding even more resilience to Sentry.

The Sentry team has announced changes to their `Shared Issues` feature, which enables easy sharing of issues between engineers and other company members. The current implementation provides a public URL for shared issues, but the team is breaking it to improve it by introducing more control over shareable URLs in an upcoming release. The new version will allow users to generate private URLs only when they click the "Share" button, change the link at any time, and turn off sharing altogether. However, existing shared issue links may break with the release, so users are advised to reach out to support for assistance.

The conference Forge was canceled due to the devastating wildfires in Northern California, but it's not just about canceling an event, it's about supporting the community through a more expansive vision for Sentry's values and goals. Engineers are glimpsing into and building the future of software development, and the company is exploring ways to bring this story and content to its users, while also gathering input from partners on how to drive conversation around modern software. The cancellation is an opportunity for Sentry to match employee donations to organizations helping Napa Valley recover from the fires and offer refunds to support local communities, rather than just holding a physical event. Forge's true purpose goes beyond a single summit, extending to a community of engineers looking to drive productivity, speed, and user-centricity through automation and observability.

Proactively Wrangle Events Using Sentry’s Alert Rules` Sentry automatically sets up a single alert rule that notifies you when an error is first encountered, but this can be limiting as it treats every error the same. However, Sentry allows users to create any number of conditions for alert notifications that are sent out to specific channels based on data triggers or filters defined within Sentry. This enables users to set custom alerts for different scenarios, such as sending notifications to PagerDuty when a significant issue occurs or notifying developers when an error impacts a minimum number of users. The alert rules can be tailored to fit the organization's needs, including setting duration thresholds and selecting whether any or all conditions must be met before firing an alert. This proactive approach enables users to proactively triage and tackle errors, ultimately leading to a better customer experience.

Welcome Jacquelynn King to the Sentry Team!` Jacquelynn King is joining Sentry from Mixpanel, where she was Commercial Sales Team Lead, working closely with her team to achieve key metric goals and close deals. At Sentry, she will work on the sales team to help clients gain value from Sentry and ship code faster. In her free time, Jacquelynn enjoys traveling, taking walks in San Francisco, and spending time with dogs.

Sentry for Android offers an easy-to-implement solution for quickly improving the debugging process by recording errors and providing valuable information about the user's phone at the time of the error, such as battery level and Android version. By adding breadcrumbs to track user actions leading up to an error, developers can provide more context and make it easier to fix problems. Associating a user with the error allows developers to see how many bugs this user has encountered and how many unique users a bug has impacted, which is valuable for both developer and customer experience sides. Additionally, adding custom context with tags and extra data fields enables developers to capture specific information about their app that can help them get to the root of what's causing a problem.

Jan Michael Auer has joined Sentry's SDK team as a software engineer. He comes from a European fintech startup where he co-founded the company and will be working on native SDKs and internal event processing pipeline. Jan is based in Vienna, Austria but splits time between there and San Francisco. In his free time, he enjoys activities like scuba diving, mountain climbing, playing orchestral percussion and drums, and coding to a beat.