A long time ago I worked on a project called Django Debug Toolbar (DJDT). It was a local development plugin that would give you a debug overlay within Django’s development environment, helping you diagnose things like the SQL queries being made, environment configuration, and what templates were rendered. In general, it made the local dev experience much better, helping you prevent or more easily fix things like N+1 queries.
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL). Last year we purchased Codecov, and a few months ago we published it under BSL/BUSL as well. That led to some vigorous debate because of our use of the term “Open Source” to describe Codecov, from which emerged this helpful suggestion from Adam Jacob, co-founder of Chef.
It seems like these days there’s a new exciting framework or dev tool launched every week. The challenge is that even if you’re ready and able to use new products, your existing tooling might not be up to the task; it could be months or years before your developer tools add support for the burgeoning platforms you want to use.
I know, we’re Sentry the error and performance monitoring platform and we catch production issues. But as you (hopefully) saw during our Launch Week announcement, some broken experiences simply won’t throw an exception. So we built a way to detect when your users are slamming their keys on the keyboard in frustration, and to even let them contact you directly when that doesn’t go their way.
