December 2020 Summaries

Sentry, a West Coast tech company, decided not to hold its traditional holiday party due to impracticality. Instead, they organized a digital all-hands event centered around creating their own holiday celebration called Spectivus, which focused on looking backward, inward, and forward to analyze mistakes. The event featured an animated storybook, toasts from the founders, and employee gifts containing coloring books, card games, and baked beans. The gifts were tailored to individual preferences and included a second wave of packages with chocolates. This year's effort was notable for its creativity and inclusivity, as it aimed to create shared experiences without forcing traditional company culture.

Slow website loading times have become as detrimental to businesses as downtime once was. However, unlike downtime which is binary, slow varies from user to user and can be difficult to debug. Google's recent release of Web Vitals provides a standard definition for slow: a p75(LCP) over 4 seconds. This metric measures the time it takes to load the largest element on a webpage. By using Performance alongside Web Vitals, businesses can gain real-time intelligence about specific users experiencing slow and identify the conditions that created their slow experience.

Support for Database Performance Monitoring in Node is now available with improvements to the Sentry SDK, enabling developers to measure the time it takes to process each request, identify slow queries, and optimize database performance.