[HN Gopher] Sentry: From the Beginning ___________________________________________________________________ Sentry: From the Beginning Author : ellieh Score : 184 points Date : 2023-11-01 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (cra.mr) (TXT) w3m dump (cra.mr) | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-01 23:01 UTC)