2022-10-07
Hello crew! I have an exciting life update - I’ve joined Sentry as a developer advocate.
Sentry is an open source application and performance monitoring tool that can be used with just about any language or framework. It’s totally free to use and open source (here’s the code and we also maintain a configuration repo that you can use to run your own self-hosted version of Sentry with Docker.
Sentry was originally created for Django to report errors, but has been expanded to work with most major development stacks. Right now, Sentry is mostly used by mobile and web developers, but supports just about everything, including native C/C++ and gaming tools like Unreal.
Sentry currently has about 250 employees, but it’s steadily growing.
While working at both Microsoft and Coinbase I had some eerily
similar experiences. Folks I met at events would be chatting with me
and say something along the lines of “You’re too nice to work at
However, I’m really excited about the prospect of joining a company that already has a good reputation in the developer community and see how much further a great team of developer advocates can take it. As of now, the developer advocacy team is only 3 people and we all just started within the last few months, so there’s lots of room for growth!
Another reason I’m excited about joining Sentry is the broad focus. Since Sentry is very easy for developers to use and integrate with (as opposed to the cloud!) and since Sentry supports so many tools, there’s always an opportunity to learn and introduce Sentry to a new audience.
Since joining Sentry, the main thing I’ve been doing is helping prep for our developer conference, DEX, which happened on September 28th. I helped out by prepping internal speakers and creating a Discord bot that polled attendees about their favorite developer tools and showed a live updating data visualization of votes as they came in. It was a fun challenge to get something working on a super short time frame using tools I’m definitely not an expert at (looking at you D3). I’m working on a blog post about creating that bot which should be published in the next week or so.
What’s next after DEX? Great question! The team has just come together, so we’re still setting our priorities, but we’ll definitely be around. I’m hoping to get my feet wet in the Django community and brush of my Python!
I’m also planning to start streaming some of my work, on Twitch (catch my first stream next week!). During October, the whole devrel team will be streaming for Hacktober on Wednesdays at 10am Pacific. It’ll be broadcast to our Sentry Youtube channel at https://bit.ly/Hacktoberfest-2022 and each of our personal Twitch channels.