July 2018 Summaries

As a Senior Software Engineer at Reddit, Andy Tuba's goal is to listen to users, understand their needs, and deliver improvements that enhance their experience on the platform. He emphasizes the importance of self-monitoring and using tools like Sentry to identify and fix errors efficiently. By leveraging third-party extensions and collaborating with his team, Andy works to provide a seamless and engaging experience for Reddit's vast user base.

At Sentry, collaboration is vital to everything they do, including their customer-focused Customer Success team, which helps paying customers achieve their objectives and get the most out of Sentry. The CSMs are measured on whether or not customers continue paying for Sentry, in addition to usage and feature adoption over time. They work closely with other teams such as Support, Engineering, Product, Sales, and Marketing to provide a seamless experience for customers. Customers can expect regular health score checks, product feedback collection, and best practices recommendations from the CSM team. The Customer Success team also provides additional value to Enterprise customers through quarterly progress reviews and customized on-boarding. To help customers achieve success with Sentry, they have built a maturity framework that defines an exception-driven culture where issues are assigned or resolved at a specific rate, improving usability and responsiveness.

Eva Sasson is a Product Marketing Manager at Sentry, having previously worked in developer marketing at Twilio and holding an MSc in Business Analytics from UCL. She enjoys creating various things, including art, deodorant, hummus, and running live music events. In her free time, she also takes care of plants, watches football, and plays backgammon.

Don't Be "Pitchy" with Your Developer Meetup Pitches` discusses the importance of avoiding pitches in developer meetup talks, instead focusing on addressing a problem and showing the tools used to solve it. The author compares pitches to musical theatre songs that exist solely for the sake of being a song, rather than serving a purpose. A "pitchy" presentation is one where the speaker sounds awkward or forced, such as when abruptly switching from discussing code to demoing a product. To avoid this, speakers should make a seamless transition between talking about a problem and showing how their tool solves it. The goal of a meetup talk is to learn something, not be sold on a product. By avoiding pitches and focusing on relevance and smooth transitions, developers can create more engaging and effective talks.

Sentry is a company that offers error reporting and monitoring tools to developers, with a focus on educating people about how to use these tools effectively and promoting community building around the tech industry. Chloe Condon, a Developer Evangelist at Sentry, joined the company after completing an all-female software engineering bootcamp in San Francisco and leveraging her public speaking experience to secure a role as a developer evangelist. Chloe values empathy, fun, and diversity within her workplace culture, citing Sentry's open communication, inclusive hiring practices, and emphasis on individuality and quirkiness as key factors in creating a positive work environment. She also talks openly about imposter syndrome, using her own experiences to help others overcome similar feelings of inadequacy, and advocates for approachable feminism, seeking to make the concept more accessible and less intimidating to those outside of the tech industry.

Modernizing Development with Continuous Shipping` The concept of continuous shipping is valuable for companies to adopt as it modernizes development by minimizing the component that's changing, maintaining high quality and stability. Longer release cycles are reasonably well-tested and stable processes, but they come at a cost: slow feedback loops and predictability cancelled out by complexity. Software startups have emphasized rapid iteration, but larger companies are now adopting shorter release cycles to take advantage of benefits like market responsiveness, greater focus on innovation, and shorter issue resolution cycles. With continuous shipping, companies can ship more software while minimizing mistakes and increasing developer productivity. The process encompasses four key components: integration, deployment, monitoring, and feedback.

Matte Noble has joined Sentry as a Partner Engineer, bringing his expertise from helping Heroku grow its ecosystem over several years. He is originally from the Philadelphia area and shares a unique food preference for pork roll, which he considers the greatest food on earth. In his free time, Matte enjoys cycling and spending time in nature.

Clubhouse.io is a project management platform that uses Sentry, a mobile performance monitoring tool, to monitor errors on its mobile app. The company's mobile engineer, Eli Perkins, used Sentry's React Native integration to track and resolve issues with the app's data fetching and rendering processes. With Sentry's help, Perkins was able to pinpoint and fix an issue where the app would crash when switching between organizations. He also implemented a new loading mechanism that fetches all necessary data before rendering a story, ensuring that the app wouldn't crash due to incomplete data. The company uses Objective-C as part of its mobile app development stack, and Sentry's integration with this language allowed Perkins to see both JavaScript and Objective C stack traces merged together.

When using the Sentry JavaScript SDK, the source code and source maps are automatically fetched by scraping the URLs within the stack trace. The ability to disable this feature on a project-by-project basis has been made available in Organization Settings, allowing users to control it organization-wide. To toggle this setting, users can locate Security & Privacy in Organization Settings and turn off Allow JavaScript source fetching, which will prompt for confirmation as turning off this feature impacts Sentry's aggregation of issues if source maps are not already uploaded as artifacts. Disabling this feature is recommended due to potential inconsistencies, unreliability, and security concerns, such as exposing sensitive URLs or encountering errors during crawling, and users are encouraged to use the release artifacts API and upload source maps instead.

In Sentry 9, the new Teams feature allows organizational relationships to be clearly defined, which structures notifications and alerts engineers about errors. This feature also enables ownership rules that direct error notifications to the right person. The commenting feature is available for all Sentry users, allowing them to notify everyone on a team when giving credit or recognition. By using these features, teams can work more efficiently towards their goal of Inbox Zero.

Sentry Scouts discussed the concept of User Experience (UX), its importance in software development, and how to create a good UX. They emphasized that UX is not just about making things easier for users but also about solving legitimate problems experienced by end-users. The panelists agreed that UX is a process that requires strategic planning, collaboration, and gathering feedback from both internal teams and external customers. They highlighted the importance of setting clear goals, using A/B tests in conjunction with user testing and other methods, and balancing quantitative results with qualitative feedback. Ultimately, creating a good UX requires thinking strategically and sorting through feedback to uncover the most compelling narrative.

Colleen O'Rourke is a technical fashion designer from Massachusetts who now resides in San Francisco. She has experience working in the mobile gaming industry and graduated from Hackbright Academy before joining Sentry's support engineering team. In her free time, Colleen enjoys playing video games while eating cannoli and being surrounded by cat hair.

Sentry's events aim to be enjoyable and engaging, moving away from traditional sales pitches and focusing on creating a fun atmosphere for attendees. The company's Developer Evangelist, Chloe Condon, shares her expertise with Jessica Deen, Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocate, on the episode of The Open Source Show. Chloe offers actionable tips for organizing memorable meetups, including pressure-tested strategies for moderation, panel structure, and openers to kick off events. She also recommends exploring past Sentry Scouts Meetup videos for inspiration and examples of effective moderation and balanced structures.