January 2018 Summaries

Sentry, a developer tool for error tracking and monitoring, experienced significant growth in 2017, with over half-a-million developers using the platform and sending around 300 billion events. The company's team expanded to 56 employees by the end of the year, moving to new offices in San Francisco and Austria. To improve efficiency, Sentry adopted a sprint process, created goal-oriented teams, and hired its first project manager. In terms of features, the company released numerous updates, including official support for React Native, improved releases, and new resolution tools. Sentry also invested heavily in its tools, infrastructure, and practices, adopting new technologies such as Jest, Enzyme, and Prettier. The company's engineers gave over 16 technical talks in nine different countries and hosted two hack weeks, with some projects becoming live features like Relay and @Mentions.

Welcome Lyn Nagara` Sentry - Lyn joins the Sentry team from Contentful in Berlin where she spent the last couple of years building a developer-friendly content management system. She is coming from Contentful, a company based in Berlin, Germany.

Reviewing code you don't understand is an important aspect of bringing together different minds to build working software. While best practices exist for conducting code reviews, situations where the reviewer doesn't fully comprehend the code can be daunting. To address this, it's essential to identify high-risk areas in the diff, focus on tests that provide context, state assumptions, and leave comments as you work through the diff to express your understanding and tentatively ask questions. Additionally, reviewing at the level of understanding you have, manually verifying behavior, and providing constructive feedback can be valuable even when the implementation is complex or domain-specific. By adopting these strategies, reviewers can feel more confident in their ability to provide helpful feedback while acknowledging areas where they may not fully understand the code.

Sentry has recently updated its default subject lines for workflow and alert emails from project names to short IDs, which are URL-friendly versions of the project's name. This change affects email filters that rely on project names in subject lines, but users can adjust their settings or update the project's short name to accommodate the change. The new convention uses a combination of short ID and title to generate subject lines, aiming to unify notification emails across different types and formats.

Sentry`, a popular error tracking platform, allows developers to aggregate similar errors by creating groups of issues using custom fingerprints. The default fingerprinting method uses the entire stack trace, but this can be overridden with custom fingerprinting on the client side. This approach gives priority to custom fingerprints over Sentry's standard grouping priorities. Developers can use the `dataCallback` function to manipulate the data object and add a custom fingerprint to it, which is then sent to Sentry when an event occurs. The custom fingerprint can be used to group errors based on specific criteria, such as error messages or exception values. By using this approach, developers can fine-tune their error tracking configuration to better suit their needs.

Introducing Sentry Cordova There are pros and cons to hybrid app development, and if you’ve built an app using Cordova you’re very much aware of them. One of the previous cons was that Sentry didn’t have a Cordova SDK, requiring that you use our raven-js browser JavaScript SDK to monitor errors instead. We've now released our sentry-cordova SDK, which allows you to see both JavaScript errors and crash information on both iOS and Android, with native device information, breadcrumbs, and other useful data. The setup is easy, and the SDK supports Ionic, a large Cordova-backed web app framework. It's written in TypeScript for safer development and faster iteration. We plan to add more features and support multiple frameworks in the future, and we invite you to provide feedback on our forum or through our support engineers.

Sentry is welcoming Sara Gilford to its team as the company's first Product Manager. Sara brings a unique blend of software engineering and video-journalism experience to the role, which she hopes will help bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches in product development at Sentry. As a new addition to the team, Sara aims to bring her skills and passion to drive the growth and success of Sentry's products.

The text introduces the new monthly event series, "Sentry Scouts Meet-up," which promises not to pitch products, make attendees bored, or serve cold pizza. The organizers have considered common complaints about meetups and aimed to create a more engaging experience with interesting panels, commemorative patches, and occasional fondue. They've taken feedback from Twitter users regarding their pet peeves at meetups, such as long talks, lack of networking opportunities, and overpriced tickets. The first event is scheduled for January 17th.

FullCalendar is an open source jQuery plugin for creating customizable drag and drop event calendars, with 7500 stars on GitHub. Its creator, Adam Shaw, encountered numerous bugs related to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the first two years of development, including issues with date arithmetic, time zone changes, and DST-related problems that could cause the calendar to freeze or display incorrect dates. To address these issues, Shaw rewrote his internal system and switched to using a third-party library called XDate, which was later replaced by Moment.js, allowing him to focus on other aspects of the project and avoid maintenance responsibilities for date functionality.

Sentry welcomes Kyle Pokorny to its team, where he will join the sales team to help prospective clients understand Sentry's value and assist with platform evaluations. Kyle comes from AppsFlyer, where he spent a year helping marketers optimize ad spend ROI, and previously worked at Mixpanel, focusing on data experimentation and learning. In his free time, Kyle enjoys surfing, biking, and attending live music concerts in San Francisco.

Delete and Discard Issues You Don't Want to See Sentry, a popular error tracking tool, allows developers to capture and present errors in their applications. However, not all issues are equally deserving of attention. To help alleviate this, Sentry has released the Delete & Discard feature, which enables users to quickly remove specific issues from their stream without affecting future events or data associated with them. This feature can be easily turned on or off as needed, and it's available for Medium, Large, or Enterprise plans. Additionally, developers can use Inbound Filters to ignore certain errors based on various criteria or make config changes directly to the Sentry SDK for more complex filtering options.