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Comment by udp | Hacker News Reader

I can't watch the video right now, and as a result I have no idea what this actually is (despite being able to read about all the features).

Fewer e-mails sounds good, but it doesn't mean much to me if I don't know what the product is.

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Are you sure you actually read through the webpage? I haven't watched the video either, and I was able to figure it out pretty easily.

> ...analyzes the stack trace of every exception, and determines which line in the backtrace is the source of the bug.... uses git to figure out who might have caused the bug... shows you where in the code the problem was, so you can quickly get to fixing it...

So, it's an exception logger that integrates with your version control system and `git blame`.

> ...sends an email to the engineer at fault...

It emails someone when it figures out they were responsible for an exception.

> ...If the engineer sits on the email, eventually it escalates...

It messages the rest of the team if the bug doesn't get fixed.

> ...Dig inside the values of environment variables, instance variables, request parameters, and more... analyze information about a bug to determine its root cause... symbolicates iOS crashes, un-minifies JavaScript code, and de-obfuscates Java code...

It tracks data about your application, and captures state useful in digging into the cause of a bug.

> ...full-featured commenting system, ticket-management system similar to JIRA, and a news feed... PagerDuty and JIRA integration...

It has collaboration features and integration with various existing development tools.

But it's for only rails applications? Only for web applications? Only for ruby applications?

It currently has clients for Java, Objective-C, Ruby and Javascript. So it most likely supports any application you're working on as long as that application has a git repository. Feel free to contribute a Python client.

It's self evidently an exception logger with built in static analysis. If you can't tell that from the lengthy description then the product probably isn't aimed at you.

It's definitely one of those simple "why didn't I think of that?!?" type ideas. Well done to the team responsible.

Not so evident; "exception" is mentioned once deep down. Zero mentions of "log", "logger", I thought at first it was a debugger ("bug" is mentioned 9 times, the first header is "Say goodbye to bugs").

They should have a once sentence description involving exceptions under "Say hello to Squash."

You're right, from a marketing point of view it could be clearer. It's not as opaque as a lot of landing pages you see though. All it needs is that descriptive strapline, the rest of the info is there.

What's not clear to me is if it's suited for bugs that dont' result in an exception and/or stack trace.

I had the same problem, don't want to watch the video as I am at work and I read quickly the headline... didn't get what it was so I closed the page. I got back to HN and read your comment and only got back to the website at that point to finally figure out what it is. So a little headline wouldn't be too much below the title (and I'm part of the target audience).

The opening statement in the video is,

"Hello, I'm Tim Morgan and I'm going to help you get started using Squash, the open source exception reporting tool that's better than what you're currently using. Plus, it's free."

It looks like a tool that can automatically track bugs and notify specific developers whenever exceptions in your project come up.

If you make me watch a video to get what your product is about and offer no succinct text explanation, I bounce 100% of the time.

This isn't a commercial product, it's an open-source project. It solves a real need and people who need it tend to be more interested in the quality of the product than that the splash page communicated maximum clarity of information in 5 seconds.

From the github README:

"Squash is a collection of tools that help engineers find and kill bugs in their code."

https://github.com/SquareSquash/web

I came here with the same problem, hoping these comments might give me insight. Please add a summary of what this is please! :)

Did you guys read the same thing I did? AFAICT it's a service for logging bugs, analysing who is most recently responsible for the bit of code at the point where the exception/segfault happened, and emailing them.

To be fair to everyone, I was initially confused, but I was able to piece together what it is. However, I'm not sure about it's scope - like if it's a general bug tracking system (as opposed to just bugs that generate exceptions or stack traces), or if it is even for features, not bugs. I think it would help the project to say these things up front.

As I understand it, it acts as a reporting tool for errors that occur in your web app.

For example, when a user encounters an exception you get notified about it while at the same time squash gives you a nice interface to view how many times the error occurred, where in the code it occurred, etc.

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