Read what ships.

21Sentry · practice

How Etsy gets its mobile apps ready for peak traffic

Etsy prepares its mobile apps for peak holiday traffic through advance planning, operational guardrails, and risk management rather than relying on capacity scaling or the ability to quickly revert binaries. The engineering team utilizes a phased code slush, dual crash reporting, remote feature flags, and custom error tagging to surface and mitigate issues effectively under heavy loads. By connecting crash rates to business metrics and automating manual triage workflows incrementally, the organization maintains high visibility and reliability when updates cannot be instantly rolled back.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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22GitLab · tutorial

Three developer tasks worth handing to an agent

The post explains how to use GitLab Duo Agent Platform features such as automated code reviews, CI/CD pipeline failure diagnosis, and cross-project chat. It provides setup instructions for configuration and outlines a consumption-based pricing model using credits. The features aim to automate routine developer workflows using broader project context than standard IDE assistants.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read8 days ago

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23Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 4

This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read3 weeks ago

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24Grab · architecture

Automated merchant review summary system with integrated feedback

To help users navigate large volumes of unstructured merchant reviews, the engineering team built an automated review summary system using representative sampling, large language models, and automated quality control checks. The pipeline generates overall and topic-based summaries while incorporating maintenance triggers based on new review counts and consumer feedback. This approach reduces the text consumers need to scan while ensuring claims remain grounded in source data.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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25Martin Fowler · practice

Principles for effective slides

Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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26GitHub · performance

How we make AI coding more cost efficient without sacrificing task quality

GitHub optimized GitHub Copilot to improve cost efficiency without sacrificing task quality by evaluating changes across the entire agentic workflow. The team implemented four targeted adjustments including selective output compression, removing unused line-number formatting, shortening prompts via meta-prompting with behavioral tests, and delivering background work completions directly. These modifications reduced token usage and model inference costs globally without causing task-success regressions.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read7 weeks ago

Machine Learning

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27Sentry · performance

Application Metrics caught my broken size estimator

An engineer integrated application metrics into a client-side video conversion tool to monitor file size estimation accuracy without using invasive telemetry. By tracking key performance indicators and analyzing the metric distributions, they discovered that an AI-generated estimation formula was flawed and producing results off by up to 83 percent. Replacing the broken logic with a correct bitrate-based formula brought the size estimation accuracy to within five percent of real-world results.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read8 weeks ago

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28Grab · architecture

GrabMart data for faster disease outbreak detection

The organization proposes a conceptual data pipeline to analyze aggregated GrabMart transaction data for symptom-related product demand, aiming to supplement clinical surveillance for disease outbreaks. The design relies on data aggregation, statistical baseline comparisons, and privacy safeguards like differential privacy without involving individual health inference. The system remains in an early planning phase requiring rigorous validation, privacy review, and public health oversight.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read2 weeks ago

Data EngineeringMachine Learning

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29Sentry · tooling

Seer, the Sentry MCP and CLI, or your own coding agent: where each one fits

Engineers often struggle to choose between native debugging agents, Model Context Protocols, and command-line tools when integrating error tracking into their workflows. Sentry demonstrates how its debugging assistant Seer, the Sentry MCP, the Sentry CLI, and various coding agent integrations complement each other rather than compete. The resulting setup allows teams to diagnose complex application errors and automatically generate pull requests through whichever surface they prefer.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read3 weeks ago

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30Martin Fowler · practice

Build your slide template

Presenters often struggle with the visual design of slides and default to cluttered or uniform corporate templates. To build a better presentation foundation, the author recommends sticking to a restricted color palette, limiting the number of fonts, and using minimal layouts without unnecessary floodmarks like page numbers or logos. This approach results in a cohesive visual identity that provides greater flexibility during slide construction.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read12 days ago

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31Sentry · tooling

Measuring the back/forward cache with Application Metrics

Engineering teams often lack visibility into back/forward cache performance because successful cache hits leave no telemetry traces and browser heuristics frequently change. To solve this blind spot, the team introduced an opt-in application metrics integration in their JavaScript SDK that models browser bfcache signals into hits, specific miss reasons, and reload durations. As a result, developers can track, query, and fix silent navigation regressions using customizable dashboards.

DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read4 weeks ago

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32Sentry · architecture

Building Sentry's Laravel AI Integration

The Sentry team built a Laravel AI integration to support Agent Tracing during an internal hackweek. Because Laravel AI lacked events for individual LLM invocations, the integration correlates outgoing HTTP requests with active invocations using provider URL prefixes. The resulting zero-config feature is available in sentry-laravel 4.27 and automatically traces agents, LLM requests, and tool calls.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read5 weeks ago

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33Martin Fowler · practice

Bliki: Sensible Default

The engineering post introduces the concept of a sensible default as an alternative to best practices in software development. Sensible defaults serve as reliable starting points for tasks in the absence of hard constraints, while still allowing teams to adapt and override them when context requires. Organizations like Thoughtworks utilize playbooks of these defaults to guide initial work while encouraging regular reflection and adjustment.

DEPTH ■■■■■2 min read3 weeks ago

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34Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: September 29

This post discusses observations on coding agents, focusing on their persistence, the role of training material in hacking behavior, and the need for greater safety measures and liability. It examines experiments with unlimited tokens and explores regulatory and educational perspectives on agentic AI.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read3 weeks ago

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35Sentry · tooling

Debugging our AI search assistant with agent tracing

The Sentry team developed a Search Query Assistant to convert natural language prompts into search syntax, which initially failed on custom numerical attributes due to incorrect field formatting in the system prompt. By utilizing their own AI Conversation view and agent tracing, they identified the root cause in the tool call results and system prompt generation. This observability workflow enabled them to reproduce, fix, and verify the issue both locally and in production.

DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read6 weeks ago

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