March 2018 Summaries

Welcome Rickie Sherman` Sentry - Please help us welcome our new designer, Rickie! Rickie joins us from Los Angeles (the one in California). During his time there, he could be found writing music and snacking in comfortable areas. Rickie now works with us on the design team, focusing on iconography and brand development. When he’s not at work, Rickie loves to cook and explore new ways to express emotion through art.

Kaylin Bing is a new member at Sentry, joining from Periscope Data where she worked on visualizing SQL queries and analyzing trends. She brings her chatty personality to the sales team, aiming to build out the Sales Development team and help with incident reporting and error tracking. In her free time, Kaylin enjoys trying new food items like tacos, cold brew, and cupcakes.

There is no standard around how browser JavaScript stack traces are formatted even within the same browser family. This makes it challenging for developers to debug issues when using minified or transpiled code, as the lack of whitespace and shortened symbol names can lead to unclear error messages and difficult-to-debug situations. Source maps have been developed to address this issue, allowing developers to map transpiled source code back to their original source, but they require three pieces of information (filename, line number, and column number) to be useful. The process of debugging issues with browser JavaScript errors can be complex and requires careful consideration of regular expressions, browser evolution, and feature detection.

Three Questions to Ask of Every Bug You Fix`: This article emphasizes the importance of perspective when fixing bugs in software development. Bugs are an inevitable part of the development lifecycle and should be approached with rigor and introspection, just like any other aspect of software development. To treat each bug as a valuable datapoint, developers should ask themselves three questions: What is the general pattern behind this bug? Where are its siblings? This helps to identify connections between bugs and potential areas for improvement in the codebase. Additionally, the article highlights the importance of considering the impact of a bug on users, team members, or other stakeholders, as well as evaluating whether preventing the bug would be worthwhile from a cost perspective. By asking these questions, developers can make informed decisions about how to improve their software and process, and ultimately contribute to the long-term health and correctness of their codebase.

The Monitor — Stephen Boak, Senior Product Designer at Datadog` Stephen Boak, a Senior Product Designer at Datadog, reflects on the evolution of the monitoring industry over seven years and four companies. He notes that despite significant changes in infrastructure, user interaction with monitoring products has remained relatively unchanged. However, he believes that advancements in AI will revolutionize the way users interact with monitoring tools, shifting the focus from tracking metrics to understanding user experience. At Datadog, Boak emphasizes the importance of user experience, using monitoring data to inform how to improve product functionality and user satisfaction. He also highlights the challenges of watching increasingly complex systems, leading to more human effort and complexity in monitoring dashboards, as well as unnecessary alerts and expenses.

Alex Hofsteede joins Sentry as a Tech Lead, bringing experience from Mixpanel where he optimized their distributed database. He will focus on developing new database technology to enhance the product's performance. In his free time, Alex enjoys family activities and sailing.

Sentry Scouts is a Bay Area meetup that hosts camp-themed events featuring PowerPoint karaoke, panel discussions, and live performances. The meetups are open to attendees who can attend in person, but also have recordings of previous events available on the website for those who cannot attend. The next Sentry Scouts Meetup is scheduled for March 21st in San Francisco, where attendees will enjoy fresh-made pop-tarts, beer from Drake's Brewing Co., and a photo opportunity with a giant raccoon. The event aims to provide an engaging experience for participants, combining elements of a traditional meetup with the fun and camaraderie of a camp setting.

GDPR is a European Union regulation aimed at protecting personal data and ensuring its use for legitimate purposes only. Sentry, a company providing software development tools, has implemented GDPR compliance globally to treat customer data in accordance with the regulation. To support businesses operating in Europe, Sentry offers a self-service Data Processing Addendum (DPA) that can be filled out to make organizations automatically GDPR compliant with Sentry. The DPA provides fields for entering EU representative and Data Protection Officer information, as well as tracking consent and changes to the agreement. By May 25th, companies processing EU data must review and agree to the DPA to avoid non-compliance fines of up to €20 million or four percent of their yearly profits.

Introducing Sentry Electron Sentry is introducing a new Electron SDK that provides first-class support for breadcrumbs, device and OS information, and high-quality stack traces with source map support. The SDK also captures native crashes, including symbolicated stack traces and context information on top of crash reports, allowing developers to see exactly what the user clicked before a crash occurred in their app. The SDK has a streamlined JavaScript experience, providing an even smaller API than previous SDKs, making it easy to set up and configure native crash handling and JavaScript error handling with sensible defaults. Developers can customize the configuration options as needed, and Sentry plans to add many more features in the near future. The new SDK is available now, built on insights from the community, particularly Tim Fish, who started the initial work on this SDK and continues to be an essential contributor and co-maintainer.

Sentry aims to improve the post-deployment process of discovery, investigation, and remediation by providing a client/server architecture that integrates with existing workflows. It alerts developers when bugs are introduced in production, estimates impact and urgency, and helps them quickly identify the root cause of issues. Sentry offers features such as automated tracking of issues in project management tools, automatic resolution of fixes upon deployment, and integration with popular tools like Slack, JIRA, and Datadog to reduce context switching and data silos. It also provides additional structured data about errors, including breadcrumbs and tags, to help developers diagnose and fix issues more efficiently.