Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years.
https://jam.devIt’s called Jam and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create).
It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer wasn't sure if I meant that it returned an error or if it was unresponsive. So the engineer would be frustrated, I would be frustrated, and fixing stuff would slow to a halt while we went back and forth to clarify how to repro the issue over async Jira comments.
It’s actually pretty crazy that while so much has changed in how we develop software (heck, we have types in javascript now*), the way we capture and report bugs is just as manual and lossy as it was in the 1990’s. We can run assembly in the browser but there’s still no tooling to help a non-engineer show a bug to an engineer productively.
So that’s what Jam is. Dev tools + video in a link. It’s like a shareable HAR file synced to a video recording of the session. And besides video, you can use it to share an instant replay of a bug that just happened — basically a 30 second playback of the DOM as a video.
We’ve spent a lot of time adding in a ton of niceties, like Jam writes automatic repro steps for you, and Jam’s dev tools use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re used to in Chrome dev tools, and our team’s personal favorite: Jam parses GraphQL responses and pulls out mutation names and errors (which is important because GraphQL uses one endpoint for all requests and always returns a 200, meaning you usually have to sift through every GraphQL request when debugging to find the one you’re looking for)
We’re now 2 years in to the product being live and people have used Jam to fix more than 2 million bugs - which makes me so happy - but there’s still a ton to do. I wanted to open up for discussion here and get your feedback and opinions how can we make it even more valuable for you debugging?
The worst part of the engineering job is debugging and not even being able to repro the issue, it’s not even really engineering, it’s just a communication gap, one that we should be able to solve with tools. So yeah excited to get your feedback and hear your thoughts how we can make debugging just a little less frustrating.
(Jam is free to use forever — there is a paid tier for features real companies would need, but we’re keeping a large free plan forever. We learned to build products at Cloudflare and free tier is in our ethos, both my co-founder and I and about half the team is ex-Cloudflare) and what we loved there is how much great feedback we’d get because the product was mostly free to use. We definitely want to keep that going at Jam.)
By the way, we’re hiring engineers and if this is a problem that excites you, we’d love to chat: jam.dev/careers
I have some feedback on your homepage & messaging.
Initially scrolling the home page I thought it was a tool for viewing customer bug sessions, similar to TrackJS or Sentry.
Reading this post it became clear this is for product managers and/or team members to file bugs. The line "Built for everyone" on the home page threw me off.
I think if you make the distinction that this is an internal tool for teams vs. an external tool for tracking customer issues it might help make this messaging clearer.
I'm not sure of your plans (perhaps you also intend for external users to use it) this was just my first pass impression.
I think this is a great tool. The structured format combined with the information provided by the extension are what make it valuable to me. The last minute feature is also nice as re-creating bugs can be a PITA.
As a dev, I would ideally also want to be able to view stack traces with source maps, but having a consistent structured format combined with the extension data is enough of a value prop to start using it.