Looking Back on 2016

2016 was a big year for Sentry. It continued a test to see if we could turn a small idea into a big vision. Just a year prior there were only two of us with an overwhelming audience to support. We finally started to consider the potential and with that vision, began making our first hires. The last year was a continuation of that expedition. We built the team to an amazing 25 people while growing our footprint by an order of magnitude. Hundreds of thousands of developers have put their trust in Sentry to help them continuously ship software. The future is all about more of the past and executing on the trust you’ve given us.

Our 2015 post-mortem focused on the raw numbers — users, events, infrastructure stats, repo commits and contributors, and our team. This year we want to share more about the work we did to achieve these numbers.

Our mission has always been to help product teams ship more — quickly and safely — and to support our mission we needed more expertise in the many platforms developers use. That meant nearly tripling engineering, focusing on core product, supporting new languages, and scaling our operations. We also started building out the business side of Sentry - growth, marketing, finance, and customer ops teams are here to ensure that our customer experience is just as good as our product experience.

Keeping with our mission, our product team’s goal this year was simple: refine and iterate on what makes Sentry great. That included an overhaul of our alerts with the introduction of Workflow Notifications, enhancing events via Breadcrumbs and User Feedback, and improvements to privacy and security with Multi-Factor Auth and Privacy Shield. We also put a significant focus on support for JavaScript error monitoring and PHP bug tracking, as well as launching the first end-to-end open source iOS crash reporting.

This year we mature as an organization, bringing important new challenges for the team. A key example of that is our new pricing plans, the biggest change to our business in half a decade. We’ve built Sentry as a developer-first business, and that means being ethical, fair, and accessible. Our approach to revenue — and your business — is no different. It builds on an absolute critical part of our core beliefs: everyone should be able to use Sentry, whether it’s for your side projects or your business. This major change to our company drives that belief forward as much as ever.

While our mission stays the same, our ambitions are constantly advancing. We want to help great teams ship great software. To do that, we have to not only challenge how we build software, but also challenge the status quo. As we go into the next year we’re continuing to evaluate what Sentry has been and what it needs to be. We have lots of things in store for the coming months both for big and small teams, and we hope you’re as excited to see them as we are to share them.

So, whether you need to debug JavaScript, do Python error tracking, or handle an obscure PHP exception, we’ll be working hard to provide the best possible experience for you and your team!