Looking Back on 2017
It’s still January, even if barely, which means this remains a completely appropriate time to post a 2017 year in review. 2015 was a big year for us. 2016 was even bigger. You know what that means: 2017 was the biggest yet.
How big is biggest?
Over half-a-million developers used Sentry last year, sending us right around 300 billion events in the process. Compare this to 2015, when we received 15 billion events. We’re all making (and resolving) a lot more errors together.
Our team more than doubled in size, growing from 20 employees at the end of 2016 to 53 at the end of 2017 (and 56 as of now). And to think, there were only two of us in 2015. We moved to a new office in San Francisco to accommodate all these new folks and expanded our office down under in Austria, the Australia of Europe.
One of our new 2017 employees, Jacquelynn, navigates her desk at our giant new office
As the team was still pretty small at the beginning of 2017, we didn’t have much of a defined process for getting work done. We essentially just did stuff until that stuff was finished. That worked, but we’re starting to get too big for that sort of process. So we got our shit together, created goal-oriented teams, adopted a sprint process, and hired our first PM. Here are the many things we got done (there’s so much, we now have to temporarily abandon paragraphs and dive straight into lists):
New engineer Mike briefly takes a break from coding to battle the ultimate opponent: himself
Q1
Official React Native support with split iOS/JavaScript traces
Q2
including deploy emails, suggested owners, GitHub + Bitbucket integrations, Heroku deploy integration, and more
Q3
Similar issues, unmerging issues, and stack trace differential viewing
Fine-grained client key rate limiting
Invite multiple members at once
Q4
Discard and delete, additional inbound filters, and inbound filter stats
Support for Minidump crash reports
We’ve been shipping continuously all year
We also invested in our tools, our infrastructure, and our practices:
Adopted Jest, Enzyme, and snapshots for JS unit tests
Adopted Prettier and YAPF automatic code formatting
Made getsentry/sentry configured out-of-the-box for use with Visual Studio Code
Adopted React Storybook w/ Percy snapshots
Migrated from Softlayer to Google Cloud ☁️ in four months
Automated cross-browser testing for Raven.js (Sentry’s JavaScript client library)
Added Snyk for automated JavaScript dependency testing
Replaced LLVM with our own symbolic library written in Rust, greatly improving our symbolication performance
Introduced our symbolicator service to “crowd source” the latest iOS debug symbols from users
Adopted Veneur to to streamline the Sentry metric collection process
Began using Redis Cluster in production
Created Eos and other bots to automate our GitHub workflows
Upgraded libraries, frameworks, and tools countless times
All this, on top of countless bug fixes, performance improvements, client library releases, and other things we’ve surely forgotten about.
New 2017 employee Jan illustrates all the late nights we’ve put in
Sentry engineers gave over 16 technical talks in over 9 different countries, including the US, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Belarus, Czech Republic, Russia, and Austria. For the first time, we gave talks at not just conferences and meetups, but also universities (Harvard) and code academies (Hack Reactor, App Academy).
We hosted 2 hack weeks this year, up from 1 last year. Some hack week projects either became or are on their way to becoming live Sentry features, like Relay and @Mentions.
So instead we’ll continue focusing on shipping great software with the goal of helping you ship even greater software. Sound like something you'd be interested in working on? We’d love your help!
