Our front-end JavaScript library has been updated with an easier way to add more metadata to front-end errors using the sendError and wrap helpers. Previously, sendError and wrap helpers only supported customizing tags and the namespace for the error. More information could be set on error spans if they were manually created, but now that type of information can be added to errors sent using these helpers.

Here at Sentry, we like to dogfood our product as much as possible. Sometimes, it results in unusual applications of our product and sometimes these unusual applications pay off in a meaningful way. In this blog post, we’ll examine one such case where we use the Sentry JavaScript SDK to instrument Jest (which runs our frontend test suite) and how we addressed the issues that we found.

This series was co-written by Musa Barighzaai and Tyler Sullberg. In the previous post, we explored high-level differences between thinking in Clojure compared to thinking in JavaScript. We are now ready to start building our first Clojure microservice. The microservice we are going to build will be very simple. It will be an HTTP server that uses a Redis data store to count how many times a given IP address has pinged the /counter endpoint.

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. This is the third and final post in a series of posts for JavaScript developers about how to set up Clojure microservices. The previous posts were: Those previous posts are useful context, but you can clone the repo and jump into this post without reading them.

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. CircleCI is growing, which is wonderful. However, one of the growth challenges we have is that our backend is primarily written in Clojure, and few developers know Clojure. Many CircleCI engineers, including myself, have learned Clojure on the job. Before joining CircleCI, I was a JavaScript developer. As the lingua franca of software engineers, JavaScript is a relatively straightforward language to learn.

Javascript is often criticized for being a simple language, but if you take a closer look, there is actually a lot of nuance to it. For example, other languages often have pointers which are a way to store a reference to a specific place in memory. In C, Golang, and C# pointers are made using the ‘&’ operator. At first glance, there seems to be a conspicuous absence of this functionality for javascript.

No matter what you’re coding, there’s always room to optimize your code and improve performance. This can be a painstaking process, and if you’re going over your code line by line you’d better cancel all your plans and forget about getting any sleep! Fortunately, there are better ways to examine and optimize your code. A JS profiler is an efficient tool to help you understand your code better – effectively finding, pinpointing and optimizing bottlenecks in your code.

What makes JavaScript great is also what makes it frustrating to debug. Its asynchronous nature makes it easy to manipulate the DOM in response to user events, but it also makes it difficult to locate problems. And JavaScript’s ubiquity has resulted in a variety of runtimes (e.g. Chromium’s V8, Safari’s JavaScriptCore, and Firefox’s SpiderMonkey) but having so many platforms can cause dizzying idiosyncracies — all of which need to be supported equally.

As you could probably tell from the title, we shipped an SDK for Next.js. This means you can capture errors, measure performance, manage releases, configure suspect commits, and automatically upload sourcemaps to view unminified JavaScript and TypeScript with zero(-ish) configuration. Why was Next.js next on our list? Well, it’s one of the fastest-growing React frameworks and developers love it.

Single-page applications (SPAs) provide some significant benefits over multiple-page apps. For JavaScript developers using frameworks like React or Vue, they offer flexibility in moving application logic to the frontend, reducing the need for complex backend operations. For users, SPAs can provide a smooth experience with a highly interactive UI and fewer page loads. But, with increased sophistication, there are some tradeoffs.