Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

replay.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 223 posts

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#11

Post by jasonlaster11 »

swyx wrote: post #6
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #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 t…

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

Yep! Tons on the site. Here's a Replay with an algolia search bug. Try adding a print statement in Hits.js!

https://app.replay.io/recording/cf2da81f-3a74-45ba-9241-f6d4...

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#12

Post by loganfsmyth »

parksy wrote: post #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.

Once a recording is made, you can jump around in it as much as you like. The network requests will only be made during the initial recording process as they would normally, and when debugging it will all be pulling the request/response data from the recording itself rather than querying the network.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#13

Post by jasonlaster11 »

maxmcd wrote: post #7
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #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 t…

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

Long story short, we forked the major browsers so that when you record we can capture the browser input (OS Library calls).

Brian walks through our approach here https://medium.com/replay-io/how-replay-works-5c9c29580c58

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#14

Post by Cthulhu_ »

parksy wrote: post #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.

It's definitely possible to abstract away HTTP requests for debug purposes; Cypress is one example, which makes a snapshot of the DOM and a log of what happened for every event, and allows the user to stub out HTTP requests. Redux's time traveling debugger omitted HTTP entirely, instead only logging changes in the state.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#15

Post by [deleted] »

maxmcd wrote: post #7
jasonlaster11 wrote: post #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 t…

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

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#16

Post by maxmcd »

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #13
maxmcd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Long story short, we forked the major browsers so that when you record we can capture the browser input (OS Library calls). Brian walks through our approach here https://medium.com/replay-io/how-replay-works-5c9c29580c58

thank you!

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#18

Post by CompuIves »

Replay has been amazing for me to debug hard to reproduce issues like live collaboration issues. You just record the bug, share it with others, place some console.logs (after the fact!) and scrub through the recording to see where things went wrong.

Also nice side-effect is that it's amazing to explore other code-bases, just being able to put a console.log somewhere to see how often it's run when using an application is a lot of fun.

Re: Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development

#19

Post by hunterb123 »

gavinray wrote: post #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 ab…

> Every once in a while a piece of technology comes around that doesn't quite have an equivalent.

I dunno, https://www.rrweb.io/ comes close (closer?) and it's open source.

There's also other paid solutions like FullStory and LogRocket.

Post reply on HN