The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The power of the button (Interview)
Thu, 09 Jan 2025
Rachel Plotnick joins us for the first show of 2025 to discuss her book "Power Button" and the research she did, and why we love/hate buttons so much. We also discuss her upcoming book "License to Spill" as well as the research she's doing on energy drinks.
Full Episode
Okay, first show of the year. Yes, welcome back. This is The Change Log. We feature the hackers, the leaders, and those who research pushing buttons. Yes, today we're joined by Rachel Plotnick, the author of Power Button. This is a book on the history of pleasure, panic, and the politics of pushing buttons.
And we had fun talking about all the research she did, all the things that go into pushing buttons. creating buttons, the history of analog to digital, touchscreens, and more. We also discuss her next book and research. The book is called License to Spill, Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives. Man, what a fun conversation and a great episode to kick off the year.
A massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at Fly. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship. That's us. That's you. Learn more and deploy your app in five minutes at fly.io. Okay, let's push some buttons. Well, before the show, I'm here with Jasmine Cassis from Sentry.
Jasmine, I know that session replay is one of those features that just once you use it, it becomes the way. How widely adopted is session replay for Sentry?
I can't share specific numbers, but it is highly adopted in terms of if you look at the whole feature set of Sentry, replay is highly adopted. I think what's really important to us is Sentry supports over 100 languages and frameworks. It also means mobile. So I think it's important for us to cater to all sorts of developers.
We can do that by opening up replay from not just web, but going to mobile. I think that's the most important needle to move.
So I know one of the things that developers waste so much time on is reproducing some sort of user interface error or some sort of user flow error. And now there is session replay. To me, it really does seem like the killer feature for Sentry.
Absolutely. That's a sentiment shared by a lot of our customers. And we've even doubled down on that workflow because today, if you just get a link to an issue alert in Sentry, an issue alert, for example, in Slack or whatever integration that you use, as soon as you open that issue alert, we've embedded the replay video at the time of the error.
So then it just becomes part of the troubleshooting process. It's no longer an add-on. It's just one of the steps that you do, just like you would review a stack trace. our users would just also review the replay video. It's embedded right there on the issues page.
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