June 2018 Summaries

Lovepreet Sangha is a recent graduate from the University of California Davis who joined Sentry as a Technical Support Engineer after graduation. He spends his free time thinking about Hazur Sahib and volunteering with the United Sikh Movement, while also enjoying time with his grandfather.

Raven TestKit is an open-source tool developed by Wix Engineering to support test-driven development (TDD) with Sentry's Raven SDK. The plugin enables error report interception and inspection of data being sent to Sentry, allowing developers to simulate bugs and test report data in a controlled environment. This solution helps distinguish between real errors in code, developer testing errors, and user code errors, replacing the need to analyze noise in Sentry logs. By overriding the transport layer using Raven's API, Raven TestKit can work natively with applications, providing a simple and easy-to-use interface for inspecting reports and verifying properties being sent. The tool has been adopted by Wix Engineering and is now available as an official tip from Sentry, offering benefits such as working offline with Raven without hacking into Sentry, running integration tests without exploding Sentry with false reports, and connecting Raven-testkit to run systems offline while working with Raven.

The Sentry 9 release was a long time in the making and involved significant changes to various features, including Teams, Issue Owners, Settings Pages Redesign, and Environments. The update to Teams added the option to assign multiple teams to an individual project and team ownership of issues or sections of codebase. This enabled the development of the Issue Owners feature, which allows assigning different parts of a codebase to teams or individuals for notification purposes. The Settings Pages Redesign improved performance, navigation, and consistency, while also introducing a new breadcrumb navigation system. The Environments feature provides an implicit prioritization mechanism based on deployment environments, allowing users to drill down to errors by environment. These features were developed with the goal of making Sentry more user-friendly and actionable for developers, while also improving performance and data storage efficiency.

Jim Balestrieri is a Bay Area native with roots in San Francisco, having grown up on the Peninsula and attended California State University at Chico. He has spent over 15 years selling technology and the last 5 years focusing on helping developers write quality code at New Relic and Sauce Labs. In his personal life, Jim prioritizes spending time with his young children and enjoys activities such as playing music and skiing.

Droplr, a company that serves millions of users globally, migrated to serverless architecture last year, requiring innovative solutions for debugging and monitoring their applications. To address this challenge, the team turned to Sentry, an error tracking platform that provides seamless integration with AWS Lambda, allowing them to scale without unnecessary cost burden. Sentry's pricing model on-demand billing aligns with AWS Lambda function execution duration, eliminating underutilization waste. The platform offers a beautiful UI and accessible UX, making it easy for developers to use daily. Droplr has successfully integrated Sentry into their projects, enabling their engineers to debug microservices as part of their development workflow, providing a clear overview of their big Lambda ecosystem, and streamlining issue investigation and triage processes.

Welcome Elaine Yeung Sentry - Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Elaine thought she wanted to be a lawyer until her senior year at Baylor University, where internships at the US Department of Justice and State of Texas helped her realize her passion was in public policy. She joined Teach For America, taught pre-k for two years, and then became Dean of the Lower School at KIPP Legacy in northeast Houston. As an administrator, she led her school's adoption of a blended learning model and used data to make decisions, which sparked her interest in data-driven decision making and software engineering. A Holberton School alum, Elaine has since pursued her passion for programming and is now working as part of the Sentry team. She enjoys podcasts and improving her StarCraft 2 strategy in her free time.

Rookout is a company that collects data in a seamless, immediate way to maximize developer insight into live code. They have an integration with Sentry and enable developers to extract data from wherever they want in their code and deliver it for analysis on any platform. The company's focus is on providing optimized data without analysis itself, allowing partners to focus on analyzing the data in their own way. Rookout's solution provides immediate data return, eliminating the need to restart or re-deploy code to get the needed information. This approach was inspired by Or Weis' personal experience as an intelligence officer in the Israeli Army, where he encountered a challenging bug that required him to collect data on the fly to resolve. The company aims to address the pain point of developers who struggle to get insights into their production code without going through an excruciating process of writing more code and adding SDK calls. By providing a simple way for developers to access data from their live code, Rookout is helping to streamline the development process and improve overall productivity.

Sentry Scouts Meetups are gatherings of software developers to discuss the future of building and using software. They explore topics such as DevOps, which encompasses empowerment and automation, aiming to empower teams by reducing tedious work and increasing productivity. The goal is shared responsibility among teams, emphasizing documentation and planning to address issues and move forward. The future of DevOps involves strategic planning, moving components upstream, and considering the implications of one's actions, rather than just reacting to problems.

Aaron Osmonson is a native Minnesotan who has called the Bay Area home for nearly 20 years, bringing nearly 20 years of experience in Customer Success to his new role at Sentry, where he specializes in building relationships with Enterprise Customers. In his free time, Aaron enjoys skiing, mountain biking, and fishing, but admits that driving his kids around often takes priority. He is also known for his ability to create a meal out of whatever ingredients are available in the fridge, earning him a reputation as a master burrito fabricator.

Exception Perceptions: Attack of the Cloned Issues (for Better Understanding User Behavior)` is about using errors to better understand user behavior and improving communication with users during debugging. The developers have created an integration with `SessionStack`, which allows them to replay user actions that triggered issues, making it easier to identify and solve problems without involving customer support tickets or "works on my machine" issues. This integration enables developers to use the power of Sentry's analytics in conjunction with `SessionStack`'s features, effectively using the force to debug and improve their applications.

The New York Times, a major publication, has been in the digital space for over 20 years and is shifting its focus from legacy issues to simple solutions. The company's CTO, Nick Rockwell, implemented an Architecture Review Board (ARB) process to make consistent technology decisions, which led to sorting out technical debt and simplifying the tech stack. The front end has been upgraded to React-based with Apollo, and content creation still uses a legacy system, but Rockwell is working to gradually move everything over to Kafka for simplified data storage. Additionally, the company is moving towards a serverless future with purposeful tools, where developers don't need to worry about scaling and architecting. This shift aims to increase developer productivity and happiness while reducing costs. The ARB process has also led to increased transparency and accountability in technology decisions, and Rockwell emphasizes the importance of open-source contributions to the community.

Justin Elrod is a Bay Area native who transitioned from finance to technology just before the 2008 recession, bringing a sales focus to help small tech startups accelerate their revenue growth. He has worked with various companies including Xactly Corp, Lucidworks, and Loggly (SolarWinds). In his free time, Justin enjoys outdoor activities, CrossFit, travel, and appreciates beers like Einstok White Ale and Silver Oak Cabernet.