Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web | Hacker News Reader

Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web

medium.com

36 pointscpeterso13 comments

I think this should be merged with "Show HN: Your Time Travel Debugger" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539247

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 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.

Congrats on the launch, it looks great!

Would you care sharing the funding story? It looks like you guys have done quite some work ("After hundreds of user interviews and 2.5 million recordings") and already got funding. Did you develop in stealth mode with friends?

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 not been invited to Replay by an existing user. Until you are invited, your authored Replays will be unviewable."

I do wish that this was told to me earlier, before I started recording. Also - anyone has an invite? XD

(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.

Hey David! This should be fixed now

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.

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.

Maybe you can offer this as an embeddable JS script where any customer can hit an "encountered a bug" button and automatically transmit last X minutes of their session to Replay servers, a la HotJar or LuckyOrange. As one of the commentors said, it's most valuable when the user directly can make this report easily.

Replay employee here:

We definitely want to enable something like that in the future. But first we need ensure the user's privacy is maintained. Right now a recording contains _everything_: all variables, all cookies, all network requests. The challenge will be communicating to a non-technical user exactly what is shared and allowing them to redact portions of the recording, while making sure that the recording is still useful.

I was one of the early users the OP talked to and I must say it's quite something. The tech is obviously insane. Good luck Jason and congrats with the launch!

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