Sentry: From the Beginning

Thanks for sharing this. I&#x27;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&#x27;ve been making some income selling enterprise support and some paid plugins.<p>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&#x27;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.

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.<p>Building stuff for primarily developers is not easy, and I think they are doing great in that front.

&gt; <i>So how do you replicate that? I don’t have an answer</i><p>I like when a founder is realistic about things. Nice read.

A jealousy-inducing OSS fairy tale :)<p>&gt; 2x the pain when you’re also on call at your day job<p>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 article doesn&#x27;t appear to mention that Sentry abandoned open source. If anyone is looking for an open source fork of sentry, there is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glitchtip.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glitchtip.com&#x2F;</a>

Looking forward to reading more of these, thanks for writing them!<p>Sentry has exceptional customer service (reached out multiple times and always get a prompt useful response or bug fix), and I&#x27;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&#x27;t have been simpler to integrate. Such a good service.

Congrats on the wonderful journey.<p>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?

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.

That&#x27;s both positive and inspiring for people working on open source projects. Thanks for sharing!

cec