[HN Gopher] Sentry: From the Beginning
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Sentry: From the Beginning
Author : ellieh
Score : 184 points
Date : 2023-11-01 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
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| robertlagrant wrote:
| A jealousy-inducing OSS fairy tale :)
|
| > 2x the pain when you're also on call at your day job
|
| I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be
| interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job
| while not annoying your employer. How did you manage it?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| I'm not David but in the same situation before and there are
| from my experience two important parts: 1) having a good
| relationship and 2) setting clear boundaries. It's not a given
| that it will work out but good faith negotiations are an
| important start.
|
| It will be close to impossible in a mega corp with strict
| rules. For instance doing this at Apple is from what I have
| heard effectively impossible. On the other hand I know folks
| who left to a smaller startup and they took that job under the
| precondition that they can bootstrap their side hustle
| alongside.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| One option (the one that I took) was to own both companies - in
| this case an agency that gave birth to the side project that
| became Flagsmith.
| spacecadet wrote:
| and without burning ones self out? or crossing ethical/personal
| boundaries?
|
| I love side projects so much and hate the grind of day-in-day-
| out repetition, I just became a contractor.
|
| One thing you can do is try and find AOR clients. For example,
| I have a very strong relationship with several other agencies
| and one even keeps a desk for me. Which at times feels like Im
| just working for them.
|
| Then I can bail or chose to work on whatever. 2 years ago I
| joined a start up for some time. etc.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| AOR?
| bartkappenburg wrote:
| Perhaps "At Own Risk", "Agent Of Record" or "Authorized
| Organizational Representative"?
| kevindamm wrote:
| or Available on Retainer?
| spacecadet wrote:
| Usually Agency of Record. But anything that says "long term
| contract".
| codegeek wrote:
| Don't get jealous. Get inspired :). I do understand what you
| mean though.
| jmduke wrote:
| > I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be
| interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job
| while not annoying your employer. How did you manage it?
|
| I ran my company (https://buttondown.email/) as a side project
| for ~three or so years before taking it full time and it was
| _similarly_ in a position where I could get paged for downtime
| or plumbing-related issues. My suggestions:
|
| 1. Honestly, choose a project where downtime or operational
| issues are less prevalent. This is a cop-out answer, but when
| you're evaluating potential projects it should be top of mind.
|
| 2. Be very up-front and honest with yourself and your employer
| about your commitments and your priorities. My personal rule
| was to only ever look at Buttondown-related stuff outside of
| what I considered my "core" working hours unless I was getting
| paged, and even then responding to pages would wait until my
| meetings or time-sensitive work was finished.
|
| 3. Set a schedule and rely on the schedule. For me this ended
| up being "side project hours are from 7-9pm M-F and 3-8pm Sat";
| at times I wanted to do more and at times I wanted to do less,
| but the former path leads to burnout and the latter path leads
| to languishing.
| zeeg wrote:
| Will add to the list of potential topics. Its definitely a
| challenge, and does require personal sacrifice (e.g. its really
| hard to balance the demands of both jobs).
|
| I wanted to go deeper on so many things, but I also didn't want
| this post to be 5,000 words long :s
|
| My cofounder was in a similar but different position at the
| time. He was at GitHub and also had two young kids. I'm happy
| the outcomes are looking good for us, because damn was that
| period of life painful for all.
| s_severus wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. I'm in quite a similar situation with my
| own OSS project - it is about 5 years old now, and was started to
| scratch my own itch. It has naturally gained significant traction
| - fortune 500s building on it, startups basing their platform on
| it, etc. and last year I founded a company around it, and we've
| been making some income selling enterprise support and some paid
| plugins.
|
| My co-founder and I also faced a similar decision to what David
| describes in the earlier post about seed funding: From the start
| I was very much into the indie hacker mindset, but we came to
| recognize that there's an opportunity to make a significant
| impact beyond my initial ambitions, and so we are currently
| navigating the process of raising a seed round.
| elAhmo wrote:
| I didn't know about Sentry origins as django-db-log. This was a
| good read, I had the pleasure of interacting from a few people
| and Sentry and they really seem like a cool group of people.
|
| Building stuff for primarily developers is not easy, and I think
| they are doing great in that front.
| tclancy wrote:
| Oh man, finding django-db-log was a game changer for me. The
| "errors as emails" was nice, but it didn't scale well when you
| had a number of Django sites to support. Having historical data
| about errors made my code so much tighter. Plus it reminded me
| of something I had built in ASP (god help us all) years before
| but hadn't figured out how to replicate well in Django.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _So how do you replicate that? I don't have an answer_
|
| I like when a founder is realistic about things. Nice read.
| codegeek wrote:
| But he did add that perhaps the best way is to solve your own
| problem. As a founder, I also can only think of my own problems
| that I faced while working on projects and businesses.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| The article doesn't appear to mention that Sentry abandoned open
| source. If anyone is looking for an open source fork of sentry,
| there is https://glitchtip.com/
| infecto wrote:
| Is sentry.io no longer open source? Have not followed it as
| closely since its so cheap.
| easton wrote:
| It's source available under the BSL:
| https://github.com/getsentry/sentry. After four years it
| becomes open source (probably to prevent "AWS Elastic Error
| Handling service(tm)" from becoming a thing)
|
| You can still run it for your company for free, if you feel
| like managing all of the infra it requires.
| kevincox wrote:
| This strikes me as a poor choice (moreso than other BSL
| adopters) since there are many other error-handling SaaS
| companies available. It seems like it is better for people
| to be using your tool hosted by someone else than using a
| different tool with a different API so that migrating to
| your offering (hosting or support) is more difficult.
| zeeg wrote:
| This would a great segway for another post as theres a
| ton of nuance and interesting history in how Sentry has
| approached the competitive market. I'll add to the list
| and maybe at some point do one just around that.
|
| That said, almost all of our competitors plateaud in
| growth even _after_ we switched to the BUSL. We found
| folks don't care that much. They appreciate open source,
| but they care less about the caveats of a license and
| more than they can self-host, view the source. They care
| about the liability of the product being maintainable,
| and BUSL still allows you to maintain software if the
| company behind it went belly up.
|
| Something also not easily understood: our SaaS business
| grew 4x faster than Open Source right off the bat, and
| eventually even faster. People absolutely desire to
| outsource problems that arent there core strength, but
| that's kind of what the industries been seeing all along
| with the rise of cloud providers and other SaaS services.
| js2 wrote:
| I know for a fact that your competition is using your
| code, even where they've built a differentiated service.
| e.g. Embrace is using Sentry Symbolicator. Having built
| my own symbolicator before yours existed, that's easily
| months of work that requires highly specialized
| knowledge. Like maybe a few dozen developers on the
| planet could write that.
|
| I know you get a lot of flack over BUSL, but I'm not sure
| folks appreciate just how much of Sentry is open source
| and how much you're giving away, some of it of very high
| value almost exclusively to your competition. I mean who
| but a Sentry competitor would need your symbolicator? No
| one.
|
| Meanwhile looking at https://github.com/getsentry/symboli
| cator/graphs/contributor... I'm not seeing what looks
| like too many, if any, outside contributions.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| They pulled a switcharoo a couple of years back, switching to
| the BUSL source available/eventually open license.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Almost all the code is out there either as MIT or Apache2.
| Changes in the last 4 years have a temporary exclusivity
| period via the BUSL and roll over to Apache2 on a monthly
| basis. We have however heard loud and clear that a lot of
| people are dissatisifed with this, particularly with us
| calling ourselves an Open Source company.
|
| We're trying out best, maybe that's not the last part of the
| story. Combining a sustainable business and Open Source under
| the same hat is tricky, and maybe we haven't found the right
| solution yet.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| As one who is highly critical of the BUSL and especially of
| companies switching from Open Source licenses to the BUSL,
| I want to chime in a bit on this.
|
| First of all- Thank You. Thank you to Sentry and the people
| there for making Sentry and making it originally Open
| Source. Thank you for continuing to make it eventually Open
| Source. Thank you for your continuing financial support of
| Open Source. I should have been more nuanced in my comment
| above, as Sentry only abandoned Open Source for their core
| product(s) and continue to contribute to other open source
| projects.
|
| I don't believe Sentry "owes" anyone continued open source
| license terms.
|
| I believe strongly in the value of the ability to fork.
| This is best for both companies and their customers. It
| allows both to pivot to new models. This is why I promote
| open source and insist on it for any core infrastructure or
| applications within my business. The freedom to fork has to
| be available to the community or any subset thereof, and
| viable. This is the weakness of the BUSL- because it
| prevents the community, or a subset thereof, from pursuing
| a key source of revenue to fund a fork.
|
| I also really appreciate the business challenges of running
| any business, and especially an open source business. I
| believe there are many viable avenues to doing so.
| Community, product quality, support, and freedom are all
| critical selling points that open source companies have to
| do a better job of promoting and leveraging. I am willing
| to talk to anyone at Sentry or any other company
| considering the BUSL about strategies to make money and to
| avoid "heretical" software licenses. :)
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > The freedom to fork has to be available to the
| community or any subset thereof, and viable. This is the
| weakness of the BUSL- because it prevents the community,
| or a subset thereof, from pursuing a key source of
| revenue to fund a fork.
|
| I believe the main issue today is less the BUSL but that
| 3 or 4 years which are the common terms are a bloody long
| time. The secondary issue is that the BUSL is a huge
| turnoff for contributions for a potential community fork.
| I know people forked Sentry from the BSD source rather
| than the BUSL rollover versions, even though the Apache2
| licensed Sentry is much newer (though still years old).
|
| We might not owe anyone anything, but we also are not
| particularly happy with the license choice we have at the
| moment. We had the hope that we can start a positive
| trend for combining a SaaS business with Open Source and
| I don't think it has quite worked out how we wanted. A
| lot of companies rally behind the BUSL that have very
| different values than we do, and that adds to the
| negative perception of the license.
| evntdrvn wrote:
| I hope you can pass on my appreciation for Sentry's
| support of OSS authors and maintainers!
| JimDabell wrote:
| There's a lot of discussion about Sentry's approach to open-
| source here, including many comments from people who work
| there, including the CTO and the Head of Open-Source at
| Sentry:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971490
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990036
| Siecje wrote:
| I've read comments from both threads. I still don't know
| why Sentry moved away from open source.
|
| Why wasn't it sustainable?
| zeeg wrote:
| Will put on my list for potential future topics (though
| we're going to talk a lot about this from a corporate
| point of view too).
| jordigh wrote:
| OpBeat was another Sentry fork I remember, but they've been
| long gone too.
| jordigh wrote:
| Just wanted to make sure I remembered right. Maybe only the
| client was based on Sentry, but I'm not sure.
|
| https://github.com/opbeat/opbeat_python/blob/master/CHANGES..
| ..
| est wrote:
| > Sentry abandoned open source
|
| sentry from github works most of the time, but the setup
| process is such a PITA.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| For what it's worth I'm not super happy that it's so painful.
| It also makes the DX for Sentry developers harder than I
| would like. I can't promise improvements but it's definitely
| something that's a shared concern.
|
| Generally speaking though we deploy our git repo to prod
| multiple times a day. So if you contribute changes, they
| deploy fast :)
| ryanisnan wrote:
| No shade here at all, but I always figured this was
| intentional. One legitimate way to get people to pay for OSS
| is to make it a real nightmare to self-host.
|
| edit: Just wanted to add, I say this as a happy Sentry paying
| user for more than a decade now.
| bentlegen wrote:
| It's not intentional. We actually held back more
| complicated features for years to make it easy to self-host
| (e.g. only used Postgres and Redis as data stores for a
| long time).
|
| The complication really just comes from the new
| capabilities we've added, and the dependencies that come
| with that. I suppose also our sophistication in hosting the
| platform has evolved (as the scale has increased), and so
| the tooling we use to manage it has become more
| complicated.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Kudos! And I get it, it's hard to do really cool and
| powerful things when large amounts of data are involved
| without involving better (and possibly more complicated)
| data stores.
| solardev wrote:
| Hey, thanks for this! I was just looking into this a few
| minutes ago and didn't know there were open source options.
| zeeg wrote:
| GlitchTip isnt a fork. Its a reimplementation of Sentry by
| folks who I had never had interactions with (afaik) before we
| migrated to BUSL. They leverage our SDKs, and maybe they've
| vendored in some of our original code (hopefully correctly
| applying the license), but you can browse the source and
| clearly see its not Sentry. It turns out its quite complicated
| to fork, build, and maintain a project at the size of Sentry
| when you arent familiar with it, and didnt help build it.
|
| Theres a lot of nuance in Open Source, and I will probably
| write more about this part of Sentry's history, but unlike say
| Terraform, Sentry (the service) was almost exclusively
| developed by myself and other employees of the company.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| GlitchTip describes themselves as a "partial fork/mostly re-
| implementation"- https://gitlab.com/glitchtip/glitchtip-
| backend
|
| Early versions of it I beleive used more Sentry code. If I
| recall correctly their initial release was basically a
| renaming of the open source sentry code. It has taken its own
| direction since.
| sirine1706 wrote:
| cec
| manicennui wrote:
| The ~15 year old application that I work on had functionality to
| record errors to its database and a dashboard in the admin tool.
| We eventually moved to Sentry.
| sir_eliah wrote:
| That's both positive and inspiring for people working on open
| source projects. Thanks for sharing!
| ludwigvan wrote:
| Congrats on the wonderful journey.
|
| Wondering how come Disqus allowed this to spin off into another
| company? Could they not claim that the code add belonged to them?
| Was it that everything was open source licensed that they could
| not claim rights, or were they just nice people?
| zeeg wrote:
| I started Sentry before Disqus, and even if it wasnt disclosed
| as prior invention (PIIA might be something youve seen), I had
| the support of the founders to continue to develop on open
| source. Its also impotant to note that all the code is governed
| by the LICENSE, which was BSD-3. I think you've just gotta find
| companies that recognize the value things create.
|
| I will say I drew a line personally: I only ever worked on
| projects that helped Disqus during working hours, so if I
| wanted to just build fun unrelated features (even on Sentry) I
| did it in my evenings/weekends. Sometimes that did mean
| contributing to Sentry, but it was to fix things that
| specifically helped Disqus (such as overloading the production
| services when we had an outage).
| hoten wrote:
| Looking forward to reading more of these, thanks for writing
| them!
|
| Sentry has exceptional customer service (reached out multiple
| times and always get a prompt useful response or bug fix), and
| I'm happy to be a customer. I rely on their crash reporting for
| native programs for an open source game engine I work on (see
| profile), and without that observability resolving user crashes
| would be 1000x harder. And it couldn't have been simpler to
| integrate. Such a good service.
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