Sentry, a startup co-founded by a former Dropbox engineer that helps developers run more reliable code, just raised $40 million
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Sentry Sentry co-founder and CEO David Cramer
When Sentry CEO and co-founder David Cramer first started creating his error monitoring software, he felt like it was "two full time jobs."
At the time, he worked as a software engineer at Dropbox, while Sentry was a side project that he worked on in his spare time. Sentry, which helps developers understand and mitigate the impacts of bugs and other problems with their code, was released as open source - meaning it was free for anyone to use, download, or modify. It caught on with the open source community, leading Sentry to a prominent place among developers."People will hear about Sentry and learn about the numbers and say, 'I had no idea Sentry was that big,'" Cramer told Business Insider. "We want to be explaining more of what the value is for these organizations that are trying to go to this modern emerging tech."
While Sentry's core software is free, Sentry sells a cloud-hosted service that's easier for developers to use, rather than having to run it on their own servers."The way we always think about is you as a customer is, you want to call an Uber to get home. You want to load the app on the phone. If the app crashes, what do you do?" Cramer said. "For me personally, I would probably open Lyft. What we do is we give the right information for those kind of events to the right time."
Still, Cramer says that when he first started Sentry, he didn't realize how big the product would become. But he says it has become popular because of its focus on developers, which allows them to update their code faster and more often.
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"When we started with Sentry, it was very much catering to the problems we had at the time," Cramer said. "Over the course of time, we saw this big change in how software development works...It's about, how can you more quickly make changes to the business? That often also increases the risk and the likely chance of these issues. With something like Sentry, it helps you identify those in real time and decide what you want to do immediately."Copyright © 2021. Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.For reprint rights. Times Syndication Service.
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