Never Miss an Error with Airbrake

Ross started his tech career as an assistant SysAdmin at an engineering firm in High School, where he was introduced to 2003 vintage monitoring tools like sar, perl, and the crontab. He was an early employee at CopperEgg - a server/cloud monitoring SaaS company from 2011-2014 - where he learned that "DevOps" is not just a way of life, but also a verb and job title.

What’s your favorite part of working at Airbrake?

Hard to pick just one, so a few are:

• Autonomy: managers are good at giving us a task and letting us work on it
• Collaboration: team members are good at working together when necessary
• WFH: this is critical to work these days, and I don’t think I’ll ever take a WFH-unfriendly job again

Thom has been a part of Airbrake for 8+ years, starting as a Support Engineer before moving over to the Product team. He loves pizza, painting, design, ramen noodles, science, programming, and pizza.

What’s your favorite part about working at Airbrake?

Building features people use and learning new things. Personal growth is a priority and people are always willing to share knowledge. Seeing a feature you helped build-out in the wild is also very rewarding.

How do you use Airbrake internally?

Airbrake is an invaluable tool for development. We use it constantly to ensure new features we’re shipping are not introducing new issues. As you develop new app features, it’s not uncommon to overlook an edge case that only pops up when real users start using your new feature within your live infrastructure. 

In Airbrake's case, we launched a minor new feature for projects using source maps: a UI for uploading/managing your private source maps and how they’re used. After we shipped that feature, we noticed that a small population of projects was affected by an error in our code that we did not catch in our private testing. Airbrake notified us of the error, deploy tracking showed us the exact code change and the person who made that change (it was me 😜), and code insights told us where to update it.

Airbrake gives us the confidence to build quickly, knowing that it will notify us immediately if any problems occur.

Garrett is an experienced web developer and full-stack engineer with 6+ years of working in the Software Industry. Outside of work he enjoys rock climbing, snowboarding, fishing, playing VR, and Ballroom Dancing. He and his wife have even performed on multiple National Championship Ballroom Dance teams.

Many people know Mike on social media as bona fide Señor Pinky. Mike is an active Global Core Organizer of devopsdays.org, and a local organizer of DevOpsDays Dallas and DevOps Live Meetup.