How your code performs isn’t a subjective debate. Well, at least not anymore — in the past few months, Sentry has started telling you exactly what’s slow and where to fix it — specifically, N+1 database queries in your code. While we’ve all had to fix an N+1 problem, performance problems come in multiple flavors. Today, you’ll notice more Performance Issues in your issue feed, Slack alerts, and email notifications.

The observability landscape - specifically your traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) offerings are failing modern-day developers. These legacy tools are made for ops and infra teams to keep their infrastructure and services up and running. But when it comes to helping the people that actually write the code to find and fix latency issues, these tools - which often come with massive price tags - leave developers hunting for issues causing slowdowns.

I, like many of you no doubt reading this, am an engineer with very strong opinions on how software should work. I am not interested in moving fast and breaking things; I am not interested in changing the world. I am interested in building pleasant, ergonomic software and charging money for it. My company, Buttondown, was born from that ethos.