Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web

#11

Post by jazzdan » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

davidten wrote: post #9

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #2

Hey HN! 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…

Hey! This looks interesting, have some feedback. I downloaded the replay app, and couldn't figure out that in order to record I needed to sign in first. But not too big a worry, a few minutes of fiddling around later and I'm signed in. After that, happily started recording and then hit stop. Replay then told me that my replay could not be viewed, because: "Your Replay account is currently unactivated because you have…

(Replay engineer): Hey davidten, thanks for trying Replay, sorry about the confusion. You definitely shouldn't need an invite. We're on it, getting a fix out now.

Re: Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web

#12

Post by mark-probst » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

I've been using Replay for the past few months, and I miss it so much now whenever I can't use it for some reason (usually because I'm debugging backend stuff).

The main value propositions of Replay are:

* you can record a bug once and then debug it as often as you want, with exactly the same results * you can share that recording with somebody else who might have more knowledge about the bug * you can time travel within the recording when debugging

All three of these are game-changers.

Re: Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web

#13

Post by jaril » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

davidten wrote: post #9

jasonlaster11 wrote: post #2

Hey HN! 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…

Hey! This looks interesting, have some feedback. I downloaded the replay app, and couldn't figure out that in order to record I needed to sign in first. But not too big a worry, a few minutes of fiddling around later and I'm signed in. After that, happily started recording and then hit stop. Replay then told me that my replay could not be viewed, because: "Your Replay account is currently unactivated because you have…

Hey David! This should be fixed now

Re: Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web

#14

Post by mark-probst » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

jazzdan wrote: post #10

stevekrouse wrote: post #3

Amazing vision! Do you envision end-users downloading Replay to create repros for bugs or is this something that the customer support team does before shipping off a bug ticket to the engineers?

(Replay engineer): That's something we'd love to enable in the future, but before we do we want to make sure that non-technical user can understand the implications of what they are sharing (a recording contains everything: every value a variable was ever set to, all network calls, cookies, etc) and has tools to redact information they don't want shared.

At Glide we've set up Replay for a few power users who report a lot of bugs. It works when you can onboard them and explain what's important in a usable replay, in particular that they have to do as little as possible to show the bug, and make it clear what the bug is. My guess is that the replays we'd get from regular users would be much less helpful, though I'd love to try.