June 2019 Summaries

Johnny Bell, a Senior Software Engineer at StackShare, shares his daily routine, tools, and processes used to solve problems and accomplish goals in his role. He starts his day early, often getting 2-3 hours of quiet time before the office gets busy. Johnny uses various communication-focused tools like Jell, Slack, Zoom, and Droplr to stay connected with his team, which includes remote employees. For coding, he relies on VS Code with its extensions, Zeplin for design, Sentry for error tracking, and Trello for task management. To boost productivity, Johnny uses Alfred, Prettier, ESLint, and a custom keyboard setup. Despite having only one hand, he's found solutions that work well for him, such as the new MacBook keyboard and an Apple trackpad.

Johnny Bell, a Senior Software Engineer at StackShare, shares his daily routine and tools used to accomplish tasks. He starts work early, finding the office quiet during non-peak hours, allowing him to be highly productive. Johnny uses communication-focused tools like Jell, Slack, Zoom, and Droplr to stay connected with his team, even when they are remote. For coding, he relies on VS Code with its extensions, Zeplin for design, Sentry for error tracking, and Trello for task management. He also utilizes Alfred, Prettier, and ESLint to enhance productivity. Johnny's hardware preferences include a MacBook keyboard and trackpad due to his one-handed nature. Overall, Johnny's toolset is designed to facilitate collaboration, organization, and efficiency in his work.

Sentry is launching a new program called "Sentry for Good" aimed at supporting non-profits, open-source tools, and educational institutions by providing sponsored Sentry accounts with 500k events per month and support from the company's fantastic support team. To be eligible, organizations must meet specific criteria such as having an open-source license, using Sentry for educational purposes via an accredited institution, or being a 501c3 incorporated non-profit. The program is designed to amplify the voices of these organizations and support their progress in creating a safe, open, and bug-free internet. Sentry has already partnered with several organizations that are making a positive impact, such as Code for America and Ecosia, and plans to continue supporting developers working on globally-impactful projects. The program is part of Sentry's commitment to leveraging technology to advance society's biggest problems.

Sentry for Good is a program that amplifies the voices of non-profits, open-source tools, and educational institutions by providing sponsored accounts with 500k events per month and support from Sentry's fantastic support team. The program supports organizations with open-source licenses, those using Sentry for educational purposes via accredited institutions, or those possessing a 501c3 incorporation. However, organizations focused on hate or personal agendas are not eligible. Sponsored accounts can make an impact by supporting projects such as Code for America, Resolve to Save Lives, and Ecosia, which use Sentry to monitor applications, provide cardiovascular health support in rural clinics, and plant trees per search respectively. The program is part of a larger ecosystem that includes other developer tools and integration partners, and aims to leverage technology to advance society's biggest problems.

Sentry has built a service called Symbolicator to handle native crashes at scale, which processes native crash reports and minidumps for high-quality reports. Native code analysis is challenging due to the lack of runtime, making it harder to extract stack traces or context information. To overcome this, Sentry uses unwind information, which indicates the size and contents of function frame records, allowing debuggers to read a stack trace from threads' call stack memory region. Debug files contain tree-like structures explaining compilation units, including types, functions, parameters, variables, scopes, and more. Sentry displays debug identifiers on the Issue Details page and in metadata of all debug files. Symbol servers provide a convenient way to retrieve debug information, and Sentry has implemented multiple schemas for addressing debug information files on symbol servers. The standalone service, Symbolicator, can process native stack traces and minidumps, uses symbol servers to download debug files, and comes with scope isolation built-in for multi-tenant use cases.

At Sentry, they've built a service called Symbolicator that processes native crash reports and minidumps for scale. Native code is challenging due to the lack of runtime information, making it harder to extract stack traces or other context. To address this, Sentry uses unwind information, which indicates the size and contents of function frame records, allowing debuggers to walk up the stack and extract values like instruction addresses. The team has incorporated unwind information handling into their symbolic library, built on top of open-source Rust libraries goblin and pdb. For platforms other than iOS, they use Google's Breakpad library to generate minidumps and process them on their servers. To speed up symbolication, Sentry created its own format called SymCache, which weighs an order of magnitude less than original debug files and is easily binary searchable by instruction address. Symbolicator can now be used as a symbol server proxy, serving debug files from configured sources like S3 or GCS, and is 100% open-source.

Karin Reahard is the Accounting Manager at Sentry, responsible for ensuring employees are paid and debtors pay their outstanding balances. Outside of work, she enjoys activities such as riding her Peloton bike, spending time with family, cooking, and exploring new parks with her dog Lulu. Karin has been working at Sentry for one year, marking a notable milestone in her career. Her personal interests and hobbies bring joy to those around her, including co-founder Bill Gates.

Rookout is a new integration platform launched by Sentry, allowing developers to build workflows on top of Sentry. The platform helps fix software issues in production and integrates with Sentry to provide real-time debug data, enabling developers to troubleshoot and resolve issues without stopping the live app or editing code. The integration installation process involves three simple steps, and users can access the Rookout interface directly from a stack trace in Sentry, allowing for seamless debugging and troubleshooting. Rookout offers a free trial for Sentry users, and developers are encouraged to contribute to its development to expand its capabilities.

Sentry has shipped several new features in May, including improvements to search functionality, enhanced SDKs for JavaScript and Python, and updates to the command line tooling. The organization level saved searches feature allows owners to create and manage searches across multiple projects, while the new Go SDK is now in beta. Sentry also supports concurrent uploads for source maps and has improved performance with a 5x increase in upload speed for internal projects. Additionally, the company has made layout and CSS changes to its documentation, renamed the "Owner" role to "Organization Owner", and introduced self-service upgrades for accounts with more than 6 million events per month.