Intern Michelle integrates Sentry with Opsgenie
Michelle Fu, a student at Stanford University, spent the summer of 2023 as a software engineer intern with the Sentry Enterprise team. We asked her to share a little about what she worked on and why she chose Sentry for her internship.
Integrating Sentry with Opsgenie
This summer, I worked with the wonderful Enterprise team, which works to develop Sentry for its largest users. My task was to build a new integration with Opsgenie — an alert and on-call service owned by Atlassian — which was one of the most-requested features by Sentry’s enterprise customers.
Sentry’s old Opsgenie integration was a legacy plugin, meaning that each configuration had to be done per project. For customers with hundreds of projects or Opsgenie teams, this was far from ideal. Additionally, the legacy integration was missing the ability to send metric alerts. My job was to build a new integration that could A) be configured at the organization level and B) send both issue and metric alerts. I was also responsible for writing out the technical specifications and making decisions about the integration design.
While the task seemed straightforward, I encountered many technical and design challenges due to Opsgenie’s quirks. In particular, I had to reconcile three different API keys that each did slightly different things (but none of which did everything that we needed). After my initial iteration of the integration, I was able to attend customer calls and iterate upon user experience—this was an amazing learning experience which led to a reworking of the installation flow. Additionally, I designed and implemented a one-click migration from the legacy integration to the new integration for a better user experience.
The integration received positive feedback from both users and fellow engineers. Of course, none of my work would have been possible without the support of my mentor and teammates, for whom I am incredibly grateful. I met many extraordinary and brilliant people, and I’ve learned so much over the course of one summer. So many thanks to Sentry for a great internship experience!
Why Michelle chose Sentry
I was contacted through email by one of Sentry’s university recruiters, and at the time, I had no idea what it was. After some research and after speaking with friends who had used Sentry at their jobs, it seemed like an interesting product, so I decided to apply. The interview process was painless, with lots of communication between myself and the company—a reprieve from being endlessly ghosted during recruiting season! Everyone I interviewed with was also extremely nice and seemed to believe in Sentry and its work. Ultimately, I was convinced to join the team, and I’m happy that I did.
About Michelle’s time as an intern
I had such a great time working at Sentry this summer. First of all, my team was incredible. Everyone was so approachable, from my mentor and manager to my onboarding buddies. They were always available to help me when I got stuck, and I feel like I’ve learned so much from watching how they work. My coworkers outside of my team were very friendly as well, and I never felt like I couldn’t talk to someone because they were in a different department.
The work, too, made this experience special—I wasn’t just an intern doing busywork. I was building something meaningful, and I really felt like I was making Sentry a better product. While I always had something to do, I was never overwhelmed. The positive reactions to my feature from colleagues and users truly made me feel like a valued member of the company.
By far my favorite experience was participating in our annual Hackweek, during which I joined a cross-department team making a Sentry-themed retro 2D roguelike game. Honestly, it was so much fun. I got to do things that I love, like animation, and our game came out pretty polished.
I would highly recommend interning at Sentry!
Make sure you check out some of the openings we have here at Sentry for internships and full-time positions.