Meet Sentry’s 2024 Summer Interns

Here at Sentry, we recognize the value of the fresh perspectives and innovative ideas that summer interns bring to the table. By offering internships, Sentry hopes to foster a culture of growth and learning and aims to help the next generation gain hands-on experience in a dynamic environment while contributing to meaningful projects. These internships provide students with a chance to develop their software development, data analysis, and customer engagement skills and allow Sentry to cultivate the next generation of tech talent. Here are some stories from some of this year’s summer interns.

Why Sentry?

Kevin Liu: I first heard about Sentry at a previous startup where we used the error monitoring product. Having previously interned at both companies with a handful of users and hundreds of millions of users, Sentry seemed like a sweet spot of fast-paced growth with room for ownership and meaningful product development. I also greatly appreciated Sentry’s strong engineering background and attention to craft - many of my favorite libraries and languages were developed by Sentry employees!

Shashank Jarmale: I’ve worked on past projects, both personal and at internships, that have used Sentry, and the observability into production that the product adds has always felt indispensable. I wanted to intern somewhere where I could be a product owner, work on meaningful projects, and receive lots of mentorship. As a Sentry user myself, I figured this was a place where I could really be passionate about what I was building. Going through the interview process and having cool discussions with engineers really sold it for me.

Joe Malatesta: Sentry was the tool I always needed but never knew existed. Before my interviews, I implemented Sentry into a personal project with a few users and instantly saw the value in the product. It was an obvious choice for me to join DevRel to help educate and bring awareness to a tool that I think all developers can genuinely benefit from.

What did you work on?

Kevin: I worked primarily on the Insights team, which builds curated views to identify and debug performance issues. During the first few weeks, I prototyped and shipped a search feature for sample panels across the Insight Modules, allowing users to drill down on specific span properties such as browser name and span duration. Following the internal release and GA launch, we observed a noticeable increase in the frequency of sample panel opens and continue to process sample panel search queries daily.

In addition to the sample panel work, I implemented ingestion-time caching to reduce Insight Module page load times by over 90%, added support for mobile browser vitals, and built an initial working concept for linking to related issues from the Insights modules. Some other highlights beyond Insights included: auditing and cleaning up 200+ product analytic events, implementing support for Chrome’s new Long-Animation Frames API in the JavaScript SDK, and representing Sentry at Chain React 2024 - a React Native conference hosted in Portland, OR.

I really enjoyed the opportunities to dig deep into a ton of product surfaces, from our Rust ingestion pipeline and JavaScript SDK to the Sentry frontend and Snuba data layer. Excited to see the adoption of these features in the months ahead!

Shashank: During my internship on Sentry’s SRE team, I worked on two projects focusing on automation and self-service initiatives, aiming to make production more reliable and enable product engineers to ship more faster.

During my first few weeks, I worked with other engineers on my team on the GoCD Job Runner, a self-service tool allowing product engineers to safely execute jobs (like data backfills or queries) in production environments. This tool, while still in the early stages, could save over 200 hours of SRE time annually which was previously spent manually spinning up pods to run these jobs, watch over execution, and report results. Hopefully, less manual toil required from SRE on these requests will allow the team to focus more on the long-term reliability and design of Sentry, and enable product engineers to implement features faster.

For the bulk of my internship, I worked on a general-purpose workflow engine as an extension of the job runner. This tool should be able to handle use cases like safely restarting or scaling up our VM clusters (e.g. Clickhouse, Kafka, Redis), upgrading systems (e.g. Clickhouse), running ad-hoc queries (e.g. Redis) in production, and taking over functionality for running custom jobs from the job runner.

I spent a lot of time investigating and evaluating different workflow engine options, namely Argo Workflows, Windmill, and Google Workflows. I worked with the rest of SRE to create a set of criteria to compare these tools based on, set these tools up in a sandbox GKE cluster, and wrote some test workflows for operations like restarting compute clusters or running arbitrary commands on a VM. Then, I got to demo these options to other engineers and get some feedback about the UX we want out of an infra automation tool like this, informing the technical spec that I wrote weighing these different options.

For example, Sentry might, in the future, use a workflow engine to automate restarting a Kafka cluster running in production, i.e. as part of an incident response or to make sure some new configuration options are applied. Currently, ~10% of our incidents are caused by a lack of automation (where a manual process goes wrong), so this can hopefully save time, enable Sentry to ship more, simplify maintaining all our infrastructure, and make production more reliable.

Zachary Wiel: During my time on Sentry’s Business Operations team, I undertook three key projects: financial modeling, metric defining, and competitor benchmarking. Initially, I needed to rebuild the existing financial model to understand Sentry’s business drivers, which required training on NetSuite and Looker. By rebuilding the primary Looker dashboard and analyzing past financial statements, I gained a deep understanding of Sentry’s financial evolution and used this knowledge to recreate the long-term financial model.

Once the model was rebuilt, I focused on refining it. I identified implicit assumptions and unsourced data, removed unnecessary elements, and centralized key assumptions on a control panel for management. I also separated external data into clearly defined sheets for easier updates and created summary pages to quickly view how different financial scenarios impact the company. To streamline the update process, I implemented automation using Google Apps Scripts, allowing for flexible period forecasting.

In the metric-defining project, I focused on Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), a key SaaS metric. I defined GRR in Notion and started building a Looker dashboard. However, completing the dashboard required a custom dimension from a data engineer, which I couldn’t finalize before my internship ended.

Lastly, I worked on a competitor benchmarking project, researching key SaaS financial metrics and developing a framework to evaluate companies using these metrics. I created a list of comparable public SaaS companies, especially in the observability space, and began applying my framework, although I couldn’t finish my research before the internship concluded.

Joe: Unlike some of the other interns, I didn’t have a specific project this summer. I was just integrated directly into my team from day one, doing all that they usually do. Developer Relations is special in the fact that in order to do the job well, you need to know a lot about the product as well as the surrounding community and ecosystem. On my first day I knew very little about either, so I spent the first few weeks building a project and dogfooding Sentry in order to relate more to our audience, understand their pain points, and find opportunities to help them through educational content. While I’m not going to detail every little thing I did this summer, I do want to highlight the blog posts I published as well as the new workshop format I helped create and trial at Front End Nation.

Firstly, to help with marketing’s current goals of bringing awareness and education to tracing in Sentry, I crafted two blogs highlighting use cases and proper analysis of telemetry data provided in Sentry’s Trace View. For my first article, Debugging slow pages caused by slow backends, I walked readers through investigating and debugging a slow page load of an app I built with SvelteKit. The demo app I created reached over 500 users and gave me amazing data on which to base my writing.

I also had the opportunity to host a workshop at the Front End Nation conference alongside Salma and Lazar from my team. While the opportunity alone was cool, it was amazing that I was able to impact the way in which we ran the workshop. My mentor, Lazar, and I developed a method to make up for the dead air that inevitably comes with hosting a workshop online. By hosting in an interactive, Q&A style we were able to proactively answer lots of questions viewers had while we talked through the process of debugging a NextJS app.

What was the internship like?

Kevin: A lot of cool engineering work in a collaborative, fast-paced, and fun environment! I really appreciated the ownership and freedom afforded; even as an intern, I had the chance to participate in key discussions and drive meaningful product decisions. Rather than implementing fully-specified tickets off a Jira board, I frequently interfaced with our designers and product managers to decide how a feature would work best for our users.

Of course, I loved the engineering challenges along the way. Sentry’s scope is complex enough that you can work on everything from Rust data processing to mobile-specific web vitals, all in the same week. I got to chat with a ton of knowledgeable domain experts at Sentry, who were always willing to help and answer any questions.

Overall, I had a great experience from start to end! I received guidance smoothly when I needed it, and I finished the term with a handful of features that I’m proud to have shipped. Would definitely recommend any future interns considering applying!

Shashank: My internship at Sentry was a great learning experience! There’s a lot of drive to improve the product and move the company forward, but also a relaxed and friendly environment. Even working in an area that I had no prior experience with (infra automation), I felt like I had a ton of support from my manager, my mentor, and my team.

The engineering challenges along the way were awesome to explore. From Kubernetes rabbit holes to game development for a Hackweek project, I felt like I was learning something new from someone every day.

With regular events like rug tufting, trivia, and tea blending, Sentry was definitely a fun place to work! Everyone is approachable, passionate about the product, and friendly. I’m very thankful for all of the people at Sentry who made my internship experience a great one.

Zachary: My internship at Sentry was an incredibly rewarding and immersive experience. Coming into the business operations team, I quickly felt like a part of the Sentry community, thanks to the vibrant office culture. I enjoyed the variety of activities like playing pool, attending drag bingo, and even trying out some painting and rug tufting. These events were a great way to bond with colleagues and take a break from the intense focus of work.

The business operations team was an exciting place to be, with responsibilities spanning strategy, data, and finance. I dove deep into financial modeling, metric defining, and competitor benchmarking. The hands-on experience allowed me to gain a strong understanding of Sentry’s product areas and the critical projects driving the company forward.

What stood out to me the most was the support from my team and mentor. Although I was given a lot of autonomy in working on my projects, I never felt alone. My team was always there to guide me and offer valuable insights. I only wish I had more time to explore and learn even more from the incredibly knowledgeable people at Sentry

Joe: My time at Sentry was unlike any of my previous internships. Moving across the country and transitioning to a role that I didn’t know existed 6 months prior was a big gamble that ended up paying off. Coming from traditional engineering internships, I was glad to be given the opportunity to learn and develop important skills that aren’t usually stressed in our field. From video creation to public speaking, I found challenge and growth in the constant iterations and invaluable feedback from my peers.

Prior to my start date, however, I found out that no one from my team was going to be physically in the office with me for the whole summer. While this did give me a bit of a slow start, it actually ended up having some great benefits. It pushed me to individually make important decisions and allowed me to connect with the other interns and engineers, learning more about their roles, and leading me to making some impactful contributions to Sentry’s core products.

While they couldn’t be here in person, I’m beyond grateful for the guidance and support my team gave me, and I loved learning from them whenever I had the chance. Furthermore, I’m lucky to have had the chance to come to SF and be surrounded by ambitious people building amazing things. I’m headed back to Michigan to finish up school, but I’ll always take with me the lessons I learned and the people I met during my time at Sentry.

Looking ahead

If you’re eager to explore our ongoing internship programs and gain valuable experience, we invite you to click here for more information. You’ll find insights into our internship programs, application processes, and the benefits of joining our team.