July 2022 Summaries

Sentry provides full-stack visibility to help developers identify the root cause of slow applications by monitoring performance and errors across multiple projects and services. It captures distributed traces consisting of transactions and spans, allowing teams to see how slow operations in one project impact other projects, and identifies third-party dependencies. With Sentry's SDK, developers can monitor changes in their code and measure metrics like throughput, Apdex, User Misery, and transaction duration to display the impact of errors across multiple systems. This enables teams to quickly find performance issues' root causes and solve them, rather than trying to fix incorrect spans, ultimately saving time and improving application stability.

The Angular SDK's compilation process was incorrectly set, leading to a crash when using the `TraceDirective`. The root cause was that the SDK was compiled with TSC instead of the Angular CLI (`ngc`) under the hood. This difference in compilation resulted in incompatible output files between TSC and ngc, causing the error. To fix this, the team switched from TSC to ngc and implemented a consistent project structure, build process, and tarball format that aligns with the Angular 10 Package Format (APF). The change required modifications to the Angular config, library packager configuration, and default `tsconfig.json`. By adopting the APF, the SDK's contents changed, but this was necessary for first-class support of Angular. The team learned valuable lessons about individualism in a mono-repo, making changes to build processes, and responding to feedback from users.

Gorgias is a multi-channel eCommerce helpdesk service that empowers small to medium businesses to deliver top-notch customer experiences by providing their engineering teams with fit-for-purpose APM solutions such as Sentry. The company's CTO, Alex Plugaru, values ownership, excellence, and a customer-first mindset, and has seen how equipping his developers with the right tools from the start can be a boon to growth. With over 230 employees and 30+ eCommerce integrations, Gorgias has successfully generated more than $1.1 billion in revenue for 9,300+ brands in 2021, and has recently completed a $30 million Series C funding round. Sentry provides visibility into code quality and issues over time, enabling the leadership team to identify overarching trends and adjust their roadmaps as needed. The platform also helps engineering managers monitor service-level objectives and track progress towards individual KPIs, contributing to more sustainable growth and a better developer experience. By providing issue grouping and tracing capabilities for languages that are notoriously difficult to track, Sentry has become an essential tool in Gorgias' operations, enabling the team to deploy software at scale without sacrificing quality.

The Sentry team reduced their JavaScript SDK's bundle size by 29% by identifying and removing unnecessary code generated during transpilation and downcompilation. They achieved this through various techniques, including removing optional chaining, switching from TypeScript enums to const and string enums, minifying JavaScript assets, using try-catch blocks to minify code requiring nested object access, aliasing object keys to local variables, and converting classes to objects and functions while minimizing private fields. These changes resulted in a more efficient bundle size, reducing the number of bytes taken up by the SDK's generated JavaScript.

Ruby is an open-source programming language that was created in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto, allowing developers to automate repetitive tasks and make their work easier. The language has an expressive syntax, making it easy to use and understand, yet it can also hide a lot of information from the programmer, which may make debugging more challenging. Ruby code can run on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, without requiring porting. Its built-in functions allow for dynamic method declaration, making automation scripts easier to write and execute. The language has various applications, such as automating TODOs in Microsoft Outlook tasks, sending weather updates via email, and more. Ruby's scalability makes it an ideal tool for automating complex scenarios by scripting reusable tasks and code.

In the article, Matt Johnson-Pint creates a custom time zone picker control for .NET MAUI, providing a consistent cross-platform user experience for selecting a time zone from a list. The control uses Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) to display localized strings and is backed by IANA time zone identifiers. It includes features such as scrolling, item selection, and event handling for the selected time zone. The article covers the creation of the control, its elements, getting time zone resource data, responding to events, using the control in an application, testing, and final thoughts on .NET MAUI.

The Sentry JavaScript SDK underwent significant changes in version 7 to reduce its bundle size by 29%, from 74.47kb to 52.67kb, while maintaining a manageable bundle size and supporting future feature development. The refactoring involved breaking changes to developers who wrote their own integrations, but the new roadmap ensured that major updates would not change or remove parts of the Public API. To track progress, metrics such as minified CDN bundle size were measured using the `size-limit` library, and tree shaking capabilities were introduced to allow users to remove unnecessary code. The changes included enabling tree shaking for transports, integrations, and stacktrace parsers, adding magic strings that enabled users to configure with bundlers, and removing unnecessary abstractions. The results showed a significant decrease in bundle size, with Next.js SDK users reporting a 30kb reduction in run-time JavaScript, and no confirmed bug reports after the release of version 7 due to emphasis on integration testing and not changing the Public API.

This tutorial provides an in-depth guide on setting up logging in Python using the built-in logging module. It covers topics such as logging levels, configuring custom loggers and formatters, logging variables and exceptions, and best practices for effective debugging. Additionally, it introduces Sentry's Python SDK, which can be used to monitor applications and simplify debugging workflow by integrating with the logging module. The tutorial also discusses benefits and limitations of logging in Python.

Python is a flexible programming language that is simple to learn and use, thanks in part to its similarities with other well-known high-level languages and its open-source license. Python's syntax is designed to be readable and easy to understand, making it an ideal choice for automating repetitive tasks. The language has undergone modest changes from version 2 to version 3, but it remains a popular choice among programmers due to its wide range of tools, libraries, frameworks, and support available. Python can be used to automate various processes, including generating secure passwords, taking screenshots, tracking the price of products on e-commerce websites, and sending automated emails. With its simplicity and flexibility, Python provides an opportunity for developers to exercise their creativity and come up with unique automated solutions to mundane tasks.

Introducing Mobile Screenshots | Sentry` Nobody likes using an unstable mobile app or even worse, an app that crashes on them. In fact, 9 out of 10 US and UK consumers report uninstalling a mobile application due to poor performance. Crash rates and snappy experiences matter for all applications, but especially for mobile apps. Mobile app crashes and poor performance not only cause users to abandon an app but can also trigger the app to be ranked lower in Apple App Store and Google Play Store search results. Just knowing your users experienced a crash or janky experience is helpful, but what if you could see the exact screen displayed before the application crashed? Sentry for iOS, Android, and Unity will now capture screenshots before the exception was fired. Screenshots for mobile show you what the user was looking at when the error happened, allowing you to see it for yourself. The screenshots feature is available in the latest versions of the Sentry Android, iOS and Unity SDKs, after updating the SDK and enabling screenshots, events will start capturing the screen users saw before the application crashed. This helps you better understand the customer experience and solve issues quickly before things start to spiral. All Sentry plans come with 1GB/month for attachment data, so if you plan on enabling screenshot attachments, be sure to update your attachment quota.

Clever.fm, a podcasting platform, was struggling with Firebase Crashlytics due to its unpredictable behavior and significant delay in viewing crash data. They switched to Sentry, an alternative crash reporting solution, which provided a more reliable and efficient way to monitor their application. Sentry's features, such as automatic logging of breadcrumbs and events, enabled the team to track down and fix issues more effectively. The platform has been able to reproduce errors with ease, resolve issues quickly, and improve overall development productivity. Sentry's capabilities, including real-time tracking, device information, logs, and detailed stacktraces, have made it easier for the team to narrow down bugs and find high-impact issues.

Sentry and other application profilers for Python are used to improve Django services' performance by capturing every single function call taking place in a given operation. Code optimization is essential for improving the quality of code and efficiency, and it involves writing code that takes the least time to execute. The Django Debug Toolbar provides insights into performance monitoring data, while profiling tools like cProfile and django-silk make it easier to analyze slow parts of the code. Persistent database connections can be maintained by using connection poolers or adding `CONN_MAX_AGE` in settings.py. Scheduling tasks is crucial for processes that take a long time to execute, such as sending emails via external providers, and tools like celery can help with this. Third-party dependencies can add unnecessary overhead on code and cause applications to run slow; it's essential to ensure these packages are up-to-date and not too many are used. Loops can be replaced with map() functions where needed to save memory and improve performance. Using the latest Python version, NumPy, and Sentry can also significantly enhance Django project performance.