State of Sidekick Live Application Debugger : 2023 Edition

Sidekick started its way under Thundra’s wings in 2021 and passed numerous milestones thanks to all contributors along the journey. This article focuses on aftermath of the launch of Sidekick Open-Source & the latest additions to Sidekick’s features. You can find the first part of the journey from start to going open-source here: https://medium.com/runsidekick/past-present-and-future-of-sidekick-d75649395be2

Going from propriety to open-source was a tough decision at the time but considering the state of live debugging market at the time & rooms for improvement for the product, it seems like the we have made the right decision.

Our Product Hunt launch was better than our expectations and we have came 3rd at that days’ rankings. This followed by Sidekick’s repo making it into GitHub trending and helped us reach more than 1k stars in a few days.

Features that came after going open-source:

• Error collection
• Data redaction
• Grafana Plugin‍
• PyCharm Plugin‍
• WebStorm plugin‍
• Saved points‍
• Sidekick Action Tags :Now you can assign tags to your Logpoints and Tracepoints and use those tags to batch control your actions. Let’s say you have defined tracepoints & logpoints and tagged the ones related to your auth flow with #auth. Once you are having an issue with that flow, you can use this new feature to enable all your predefined logpoints & tracepoints tagged with #auth & collect the necessary information. No more collecting excess amount of logs etc. and getting lost in them, collect what you need only when you need it.‍
• Remote configuration of agents: Sidekick Agents used to be wild & free, with our latest update you are now able to change their attach/detach status, maxFrames, parse depth and enable/disable error stack collection remotely via Sidekick WebIDE & Rest API. So you can keep Sidekick agents disabled until you really need them and toggle to start collecting data.

• Sidekick Test Module : An external client for Sidekick that opens our way to bring Sidekick actings to tests. Check out Collecting error stacks from backend as exceptions occur in E2E tests — A tutorial on Cypress
• Cypress Plugin for E2E tests

• New Data Targets for logs & snapshots!
  Sidekick integrations are growing, and a lot more are on the way. Last month we were busy adding new ones, and you can find the whole list below:
  - Slack
  - Logz.io
  - Sumo Logic
  - Solarwinds Loggly
  - New Relic
  - Elasticsearch
  - Loki
  - Coralogix
• Sidekick Dashboard for exploring & analyzing the collected data.
• Linear & Jira integration: With Sidekick Web IDE’s latest update, you can use Sidekick-generated logs, tracepoint data & error stacks to create your issues.
• Sidekick Docs also became open-source using Docusaurus under the hood. https://github.com/runsidekick/sidekick-docs

Recently we have enabled Github discussions in our repository, providing an interactive platform for our community to engage in conversations, ask questions, and share ideas.

https://github.com/runsidekick/sidekick/discussions

As a member of our community, your contributions and insights are essential to the growth and success of our project. We encourage you to visit our repository, join our discussions, and share your thoughts with us. Together, we can create a better product and a stronger community.

In conclusion, making our Sidekick software open source has had a positive impact on our development process, enabling us to collaborate with a broader community of developers and users. By opening up the codebase, we have received valuable feedback and contributions that have helped to improve the software and make it more robust and user-friendly. We are excited to continue this process and welcome new feedback and contributions from the community. With everyone working together, we can create a powerful tool that meets the needs of developers everywhere.

Finally we have prepared a Sidekick Wrapped 2022 video for you. Make sure to check it out and share your thougths: