Monday 13 February 2012

Slicing and Dicing Errors

The most up-voted feature request on our UserVoice Forum had to do with slicing the errors list to see only a sub-section of the errors. The use case was this: Let's say you deployed code yesterday that fixed a bunch of your bugs. Now, you are particularly interested in bugs that happened since yesterday, since it'll tell you if your fix did indeed work and if any new bugs have been introduced. However, Errorception didn't allow any such slicing of errors. Until now.

Now, in your error listing, you will see a little sidebar that will let you slice and dice your errors list based on time, browser, and any combination of the two.

JavaScript App

To make the filters possible, and to provide the best UX, Errorception's error listing page is now rather JS-heavy. What this means for you is that you get a highly responsive UI, and you can interact with the filters mentioned above without having to go through painful page reloads. But this JS-driven UI has another benefit, one that is just awesome in the long term.

Yo dawg, I herd you like Errorception

The most important change, is that now Errorception uses — wait for it — Errorception! I was never comfortable that I wasn't a heavy user of Errorception myself, but now that's fixed. I'll be actively using Errorception to find bugs in Errorception. Of course, this helps reduce errors. However, and more importantly, it helps me identify pain-points that everyone faces in the day-to-day use of Errorception. It ensures that the feature set of Errorception grows to have the right mix of the best features and ease of use.

It was exciting to see that since I've pushed this build out, I've already caught two errors in the new JS. I have already fixed and deployed new code to address these issues! That's exciting!