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Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by calinet6 on Friday September 21, 2012 @12:34PM (#4554401)
If only they didn't frequently lose our exception data, this would be great news!

Honestly, their only job is to store stack traces. In about 20% of occurrences over the last 6 months, we've been told that our data "has been lost and is not recoverable." Thus we know that an exception has occurred, but we're lost as to why.

It's such a simple app that we've considered rolling our own. We believe we can achieve better than 80% uptime.

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by brianr on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:24PM (#4554691)
Give us a try - http://ratchet.io . Mention HN when signing up and I'll send you an invite right away.

Btw, it is fairly simple to build a minimally-useful product like this -- I built our prototype in about 2 days. But there's an extremely vast array of really cool and useful functionality that we're working on that takes a lot longer :) We're currently at around 20k lines of code.

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by nonrecursive on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:51PM (#4554822)
And here's an open source, self hosted solution: http://www.whoopsapp.com/

It only takes about a minute to set up on heroku, and it can store whatever you want, not just exceptions.

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by ergo14 on Friday September 21, 2012 @07:39PM (#4556479)
Hello @calinet6, I've also wanted to suggest http://errormator.com - there is an excellent python client provided. It incorporates multiple features in a single package, exception gathering, integratted logging, slow query/request information.
Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by benarent on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:06PM (#4554580)
Hi @calinet6. Sorry to hear that you've been having issues with your account. Please send a mail to [email protected] or [email protected] (depending on your product) and we'll be happy to look into this issue for you.
Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by calinet6 on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:16PM (#4554643)
I have, and I've been told the bug has been fixed and I should not see the issue again. I've been told this twice now (1 month apart). I think hearing "the issue is resolved" is about as finished as the issue can be, I guess I can only hope it doesn't come up a third time.

So, your uptime average is slowly creeping up again. Otherwise we're relatively happy with the service—it's just that there isn't much "otherwise" besides simply viewing the stack trace. Honestly there's not much to it.

Congrats on your achievement and all, but it's difficult for me to get excited about an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or two.

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by evincarofautumn on Friday September 21, 2012 @02:00PM (#4554862)
“an app that any competent programmer could probably whip up in a day or two”

You must tread very, very carefully when using those words. Being programmers does not magically admit us to a complete understanding of every detail of a piece of software. If you’ve ever delivered a product, you should know that what the user sees is only a fraction of the whole—even if the user happens to be a competent programmer. And if you consider yourself such a programmer, why not try replicating their software from scratch, if it will really only take a day or two?

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by calinet6 on Friday September 21, 2012 @02:30PM (#4555027)
I completely agree, obviously there are many complications and other concerns that could make it a much more difficult task.

I envision most of the difficulty that exceptional.io has encountered has been related to scalability. If I wanted a small, simple, self-hosted application with this functionality, it will probably be simpler. I'm not guaranteeing this, but I'm making a good estimate based on my experience creating similar web apps and utilities throughout my career—this ain't no blind shot in the dark guess.

You're right, being programmers does not make us magically able to understand details of software. But being good software engineers does involve a lot of exactly that skill. They are separate and distinct skills, but most great programmers I know are also great software engineers, and also great estimaters of project complexity. In my experience, I am as well (in fact I am generally better at estimating project architecture, complexity and time than I am at programming itself). This is where my response comes from—not simply being a programmer. Apologies for the confusion.

Re:Exceptional Software finds success in errors by true_religion on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:14PM (#4554634)
If you use Python, you might enjoy using Sentry. It's great for collecting errors for a small team.

The only downside I can figure is that it doesn't integrate with any ticketing system.