When a user experiences an error in an application, the engineers who are building that application need to find out why that error occurred. The root cause of that error may be on the user’s device, or within a piece of server-side logic, or hidden behind a black box API. To fix a complex error, we need a stack trace of contextual information so that we can correlate events across all layers of an application.

James Smith is the CEO of Bugsnag, a company that makes crash reporting and error tracking software. In this episode, he describes how to diagnose errors in modern applications. He also explains how the company functions and how Bugsnag itself is built. The product consumes and stores millions of events which makes for a good discussion of software architecture. Full disclosure: Bugsnag is a sponsor of SE Daily.