Been making steady progress on Project Chronos this week. There will be a new blog post here soon with some details on status.

The first is Hoptoad, it is a rails service for tracking application errors. It aggregates error, tracks what deploys they've happened with, and integrates nicely with Lighthouse and GitHub (in the pay versions). It also sends you a notification email the first (and only the first) time a new error occurs. The integration though isn't at all required to appreciate the app. It makes it incredibly convenient to track what types of things are going wrong, and how frequently they are occurring. We have some in house tools designed to do this kind of thing at Nexopia, but nothing as polished. The best part about it is from the time I decided to install it to the time I had completed integration was under 2 minutes.

The second cool new service I found is New Relic, recommended to me by @tvongaza after I mentioned my pleasure with Hoptoad. New Relic does performance monitoring for your app. Measures the time it takes to complete a page, the cpu load, database load, etc. It also has a very nice development mode that lets you drill down into the details of individual transactions on your development server. It has a free version that is available for unlimited hosts, but it doesn't include the full feature set of several quite expensive pay versions. The feature set of the free edition is still excellent, it can be a bit annoying to see the constant reminders of features you can't use though. Between these two excellent services and my recent adoption of GitHub, I am feeling pretty happy about my developer tools now.