Show HN: Bugout.dev – Crash and usage reports for developer tools
I started off as a professional ballerina, and entered technology later in my working life - through the OpenAI Scholars program. My co-founder, Neeraj (zomglings on HN), is a mathematician and now programmer.
When I was learning how to code I kept running into issues. I found Stackoverflow and GitHub issues hard to navigate, often leading me to outdated solutions to the problems I was experiencing. That experience made me want a product that would collect crashes and immediately let the creators of the software I was using know about the issue. And when they or their community had fixed the issue, they could notify me about that and direct me to a public site detailing the solution.
Over time, this idea evolved and resulted in Bugout.dev. Bugout makes it easy for creators of developer tools to collect usage metrics and crash reports from their users. This applies equally well to libraries, command line utilities, and APIs.
We're advocates of ethical data collection, and all reports are collected with clear user consent. Maintainers can also comply with GDPR requests for access and deletion with a single API call each.
We are also building a public knowledge base of issues and solutions from open source projects. We were inspired by rustc error messages in this and how they point users to documentation that can help you resolve compiler errors. Projects integrating with Bugout can link users to the knowledge base using a search query, which allows them to direct users to solutions customized to operating system, library version, and even compiler/runtime version.
We support developer tools written in Python and in Go - we just launched the Go library this week!
Please check out our GitHub page: https://github.com/bugout-dev/humbug. We would greatly appreciate your feedback.
3 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] threadThe libraries offer a rich vocabulary of consent mechanisms that our users can piece together to form consent flows.
Here is a really great example of how the pants build system integrated with Bugout: https://www.pantsbuild.org/v2.4/docs/anonymous-telemetry
Fulfilling a GDPR request for access takes a single call to our API and fulfilling a request for deletion is also a single call.
Finally, we have a short circuit in place that any developer can use to turn off Bugout reporting globally. All you have to do is set the environment variable: BUGGER_OFF=true
I really hope you win this product category. It would be a shame to have another company with less respect for user data to "move fast and break things".
I've found that I write tighter, cleaner, and generally better code when it's internal and proprietary compared to open source. The reason is that if something raises an exception internally it's OK because there's a notification and the exception gets fixed. But the risk of an exception being raised on someone else's computer that I never see causes overly defensive code: omitting assertions, swallowing overly general exception classes, ignoring encoding errors, etc. Coding defensively gives robust code, but coding too defensively creates irrational, cargo-culting code that silences errors instead of raising them.
So I think there's a lot of value for users and developers to share more granular error reports.