August 2018 Summaries

Purdue University's Retired .NET Peer Review App & the Path to Error Monitoring` The story begins with Gradient, a newly launched peer review app at Purdue University in February 2013, which was built using .NET MVC and hosted on campus. The app experienced significant issues due to a large number of students submitting assignments close to the deadline. The team responded by tweaking queries, implementing caching, and redeploying, with some developers working through the weekend to resolve the issue. Although they later replaced Gradient with a new app called Circuit, Sentry error monitoring was instrumental in helping them identify and fix intermittent errors, particularly Redis timeout issues, before building the new app.

I, like many of us, rely on my apps and I need them to work. Full stop. I don’t have time to deal with crashing, freezing, or loading screens. So if an app doesn’t work, I quickly uninstall it, search the app stores, and download an alternative. And, I’m not an outlier: The average user force-quits an app if it freezes for longer than 3-seconds. Mobile app developers need to ensure the best possible experience for their users to make sure they come back or tell their friends about it. Sentry provides support and mobile error monitoring for every major mobile app platform, including Xamarin, and it’s as easy as installing a package and writing one line of code. With Sentry, developers get immediate notifications if their app crashes on a user's device and see the complete stack trace, so they know exactly which line of code to investigate and fix.

Derek Sorkin joins Sentry as the company continues to expand its presence after five years at GitHub, where he worked in sales for Asia and Australia, building business relationships in those regions. He brings his experience to a new role, expanding on his background in sales and international expansion. With interests in fine Gin, hiking, and food, Derek's personal life is as diverse as his professional path.

The .NET ecosystem's NuGet package management system has introduced a feature to curb misleading namespaces and instill security by allowing developers to reserve package prefixes. This change was made to address the issue of inconsistent naming conventions, which created distrust among .NET users. With the new feature, developers can request a reserved prefix for their packages, ensuring that only authorized parties use those prefixes. The process is simple, with a few hours' response time from NuGet's account team. The change also introduces organizations on NuGet.org, allowing companies and teams to collaborate under a single identity. Furthermore, Sentry plans to sign its packages, which will allow developers to fully trust the package's integrity when loading it into their app.

In this edition of Life at Sentry series, the company introduces its 2018 summer interns - Elaine Yeung, Josh Li, and Ayesha Omarali. They share their paths to Sentry, describe the company in one word, give advice to future interns, discuss their most important learnings during the internship, and share fun stories from their time at the company. The interns highlight the importance of Sentry's problem-solving approach, which helps developers manage errors more efficiently. They also emphasize the value of a supportive work environment that encourages continuous learning and personal growth.

Monitoring and feedback are crucial components of a successful continuous shipping process, enabling teams to minimize risk, increase productivity, and improve customer sentiment. By integrating monitoring tools such as Sentry, Prometheus, and Datadog into the application and systems, teams can quickly identify issues, automate problem-solving, and deploy changes with confidence. Root cause analysis and high-level tracing are also essential for understanding complex problems and identifying the root cause of errors. The feedback phase involves proactive customer support, automation, and alerts to resolve issues efficiently and reduce friction. By leveraging these tools and strategies, teams can modernize their development processes, improve productivity, and deliver faster, more reliable software releases.

Erin Dame joins Sentry as a developer, bringing her experience from Weebly where she created an online community from scratch and spent time scouring the internet for puns to use in blog posts. Erin is also a fan of Disney musicals, reading conspiracy theories about Animal Crossing games, and enjoying donuts. She is the second former Weebly employee to join Sentry.

The fourth Sentry Scouts Meetup focused on security in software development. Security experts discussed how to balance protection against unauthorized access with usability for legitimate users. They emphasized understanding user behavior and internal security assets, as well as the importance of constant learning and collaboration within the open-source community. While change on the internet may be slow, advancements in technology require ongoing education and focus on privacy.

Sentry's streamlined SDKs aim to provide a unified experience across all platforms, eliminating the need for switching between different SDKs. The new Scopes concept manages context handling and works consistently across all new SDKs, defining a baseline of options that function similarly regardless of the integration used. This unification enables seamless transitions between different platforms, allowing developers to focus on improving their product rather than managing multiple SDKs. The unified API provides a more logical and powerful way to harness Sentry's features, including hooks, callbacks, and extension methods, while maintaining idiomatic support for each ecosystem. With this new foundation, Sentry plans to introduce future features and provide continued support for existing SDKs.

Continuous shipping is a shortened feedback cycle that aims to minimize risk, increase productivity, and improve customer sentiment by allowing teams to quickly iterate on their work. The process involves integration, deployment, monitoring, and feedback, with the first two elements being covered in this article. Integration is crucial as it ensures tools play nicely together, but it can be a rigorous and time-consuming process that requires a change control process. This process allows teams to do their best work while making minimal interruptions to everything else. A successful integration phase comes down to verifying changes via automated testing and determining whether the change can be merged. Deployment is also critical as it fosters builds that are repeatable, minimizes risk through rollout strategies, and requires blocking deployments that haven't passed verification. The deployment phase lacks technological resources, but products like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform can provide the necessary control for larger projects.

Sentry is welcoming Josh Li as a Software Engineering Intern for the summer, under the guidance of Matt. Josh, a computer science major at PSU in Pennsylvania, is likely to be found participating in various office activities such as food-related tasks or other miscellaneous pursuits when not focused on his work.

In this episode of The Open Source Show, Chloe Condon from Sentry discusses the importance of observability in improving UX and fixing issues fast. Observability provides real-time visibility into systems, allowing developers to identify and address problems more efficiently. By using tools like Sentry, developers can gain insights into their code and data, reducing the need for manual logging and error analysis. The conversation aims to help listeners avoid common pitfalls, such as getting overwhelmed by notifications, and provide guidance on how to implement observability in their own projects.