February 2020 Summaries

Travis CI is used by Sentry to automate testing and view results within pull requests, allowing for the creation of Sentry Releases that enable features like identifying commits that likely introduced new errors. A .travis.yml file is used to configure Travis CI, including setting programming languages and version numbers, as well as customizing the build process with hooks. To create a new Sentry Release, environment variables are set using `env` in the `.travis.yml` file, and the Sentry CLI is used to install and finalize releases after the build phase completes successfully. The complete `.travis.yml` file for this example includes scripts to run tests, create a new Sentry release on push to master, and use the Sentry CLI to finalize the release.

Sentry has integrated its error monitoring system with PagerDuty's automated escalation system to help users quickly resolve issues identified by Sentry. The integration allows for setting up fine-grain alert rules in Sentry and linking each Sentry issue to its corresponding PagerDuty issue, providing all necessary context for swift resolution. To use the integration, go to Settings, click on Integrations Page, follow the instructions, and set up custom alerts via PagerDuty.

Our company values have evolved from a set of principles developed by our founding team in 2017 to a more refined and relevant set that reflects our growth stage and daily operations. The new values are designed to be clear, useful, and representative of our growth mindset, with themes of establishing and fostering a growth mindset, being opinionated and willing to share and defend those opinions with data. Our first value, "For Every Developer", highlights our focus on making Sentry indispensable to developers, while "Work in Progress" emphasizes our flexibility and agency in developing processes and improving our work. The values also touch on the importance of attention to detail, feedback, and valuing people, with a focus on fostering a growth mindset and supporting each other's decisions.

We offered to redistribute Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund award, which would have funded Sentry engineers' projects, instead of keeping it for ourselves. We decided to de-prioritize larger organizations and focus on underfunded projects that we've relied on over the years. The funds were allocated to five projects: Black, a code formatter; Gimli, a library for crash reports; PyPI, Python's public package repository; Pytest, a popular testing library; and Structlog, an alternative logging module. This initiative has inspired us to put more money behind open source funding this year, with a budget of $100,000.

Your customers' experience is seamless across devices and platforms, requiring resolution tools that work across organizational and technical boundaries. Tool fatigue is real, using products that don't connect with the entire customer experience is suboptimal. Sentry for Mobile offers faster issue resolution, reduced interaction bloat, a single source of truth, and trust in its long-term support. It supports over 50,000 teams and+1 million developers, and provides a fun surprise to those switching from other mobile error reporting vendors by March 15, 2020.

Sentry is a software tool that provides collaborative features to help teams determine root cause and resolve problems with their production software. To improve user adoption, the Growth team rethought invitations by tackling three distinct areas: surfacing the ability to invite users contextually, expanding Sentry's permission model to allow more types of users to send invitations, and allowing external users to request access themselves. They introduced a new contextual invitation modal that manages capabilities in a smaller, more concise experience, and updated their permission model to democratize invitations. The team then A/B tested the impact of these changes, finding that allowing wider sets of users to invite team members resulted in more users inviting team members, while enabling both features at the same time was even better. Additionally, they found that new users were more likely to become active users after accepting an invitation. The changes improved user adoption and product usage, with no trickery or "growth hacks" used to achieve these results.

Sentry has introduced new features to its Discover tool, making it easier to diagnose root causes of issues in customer-facing applications. The new features include the ability to track trending issues, an improved query builder, and pre-built searches that can answer common questions about events and errors. These updates aim to make it simpler for developers to measure the health of their services and identify performance issues with minimal effort. With these enhancements, Sentry aims to further improve its customer-facing issue tracking capabilities.

The Integration Dashboard provides visibility into how integrations are performing, including installation charts, view metrics, and webhook request logs. Developers can use these features to understand the business value of their integrations and identify potential technical issues.