Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’re debugging a local app using your favorite IDE. You set a breakpoint, the code stops, and you look at the local variables. You get a sense of what’s going on, what has happened, and what should happen next. Then, you step forward to the next line of code, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that is invoking a function, so you step in again…

In our Sentry for Data series, we explain precisely why Sentry is the perfect tool for your data team. The present post focuses on how we used Sentry to make debugging Apache Beam easier (and faster). Since its creation, Sentry has embraced a single vision: help all developer teams build the best software, faster. We want to give developers the information they need to resolve issues quickly, without having to dig through noisy log lines.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud recently released the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. The report discusses four core DevOps key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring change. For most of us in software engineering, especially in the era of “configuration as code,” change means “code change” and is about commits to some source control repository.

Written in collaboration with: Or Weis In an ideal world, developers would not need to waste precious time writing countless log lines along with every few lines of code they create. We would instead be focused on building the best features we possibly can. In a perfect world, if a problem comes up and some data is missing, devs would be able to effortlessly extract that data. Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world.

It’s 2 AM on a Saturday and you get a call. You bolt out of bed and pick up the phone knowing that something terrible has happened. No, your dog didn’t get kidnapped and you don’t need to use your particular set of skills and parental rage to bring its captors to justice. Instead, your weekend slumber has been interrupted because there’s a bug in a system and you have to fix it.

Welcome fellow developer, I can see you’ve traveled a long road, why don’t you stay a while and listen? I’ve got some fantastic stories to share; Lessons to imbue your debugging skills with power and wisdom, adding at least 1000 XP to take you to the next level and make your future travels much safer. Hmm, now, where should we start? Have you already faced the terrifying Heisenbugs? They are truly fantastic.

Modern software production stops for no one, and everyone is needed to keep it rolling. Every dev is on-call. Great speed and friction produce a lot of heat, and when everything is on fire all the time, even the best devs and engineers struggle to keep the train speeding onwards without getting burned. What makes maintaining modern production so hard? And what is the difference between being good and being bad at dev-on-call? Let’s dive in and see.

If you’re a Rails developer, then you’ve probably used Rails Logger on at least one occasion or another. Or maybe you have used it without even realizing, like when you run ‘rails server’ and it prints information to the terminal window, for example. Rails Logger provides us with a powerful way of debugging our applications and gives us an insight into understanding errors when they occur.

There are a lot of things we, at Sentry, love about Rookout, a Sentry Integration Platform early adopter. First of all, Sentry loves purple, and Rookout loves purple. And, Rookout helps fix software in production, and Sentry helps fix software in production. Together, the two tools cut time from error to resolution. Honestly, Rookout and Sentry integrating is just kismet.

Logs. Do we really need them? As developers, we write the code and the tests, and everything seems to be looking great. Why then, do we need to spend even more time writing a bunch of lines nobody is ever going to read? Recently I did a talk on the subject at StatsCraft (check out the slides here). This post, a summary of the talk I gave, will discuss why we need good, informative logs, and how we can write them well enough.