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Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

replay.io

1–10 of 223 posts

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#3
Engineer @ Replay here - If you're a console.log kind of developer (isn't everyone at least some of the time?), you should check this out. Imagine being able to add console.log() statements to code that already ran and seeing the results immediately! It's a bit mind blowing the first time you use it.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#4
Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years!

Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind.

Here’s how Replay works today. Somebody on the team records a bug with the Replay Browser and shares the replay url with the team. From there, developers jump in and add print statements. The logs appear in the Console immediately so you don’t need to refresh and reproduce a thing.

Over the past year we’ve talked to hundreds of users, recorded 2.5 million replays, and worked incredibly hard to ensure Replay would be fast, secure, and robust from the get go.

Want to check it out? You can download Replay today. Can’t wait to hear what you think!

Interested in learning more, here is our announcement blog post https://medium.com/replay-io/launching-replay-the-time-trave...

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#5
That landing page looks right out of Bret Victor's time travel demos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA, or http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/). Communicates the value instantly. Incredibly well done!

IMO the most time consuming issue in triaging bug reports is reproducing them. Replay definitively solves the "can't repro this" problem.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#6

Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years! Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind. Here’s how Replay works t…

are there any public replays you can share so pple can get a feel of the product without downloading?

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#7

Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years! Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind. Here’s how Replay works t…

How does it work? Are you making memory snapshots? Something higher level?

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#8
Through $DAYJOB, I happened to have a meeting with one of the founders of this company some time ago -- not about Replay, but about a "How do you do this" sort of question.

After prying for technical details, Replay came up, and I asked to see it out of curiosity.

Really blew my mind. Every once in a while a piece of technology comes around that doesn't quite have an equivalent.

I could immediately see where being able to have your users or coworkers record bug reproductions or features and submit them in issues or PR's would save monumental amounts of time.

Wishing Replay team best of luck, I was thoroughly impressed.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#9

Co-founder here. It feels incredible to be sharing Replay with all of you. It's been a labor of love the past five years! Replay started off as a simple experiment in what would happen if we added a step back button and rewind button to the Debugger. We quickly realized two things. First, nobody uses breakpoints. Second, being able to share is so much more powerful than being able to rewind. Here’s how Replay works t…

The problem with breakpoints is my loop runs 1000 times and I only care about the one time it errors. Making watch logic for that sometimes is too complicated or changes the outcome (race conditions especially). This seems like a great solution. I'll be checking it out!

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#10
In my line of work I've found the most difficult issues to debug are asynchronous dependencies on API actions. How nicely does replay work with POST data, if I scrub back and forth will I retrigger POSTs or is the request/response captured and emulated in the replays? If replay handles this nicely then I'm very very interested in adding it to our workflows.
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