Our ex-cloudflare team built a tool that extracts debug data from screen recordings

Hey DEV Community! 4 years ago, an ex-Cloudflare team and I started building a product — trying to make bug reporting a lot less painful.

Our tool is called Jam and it makes it pretty much impossible to create vague bug reports (like I used to when I was a PM). It's really hard as a non-engineer to send useful debug info!

If you care a lot, you'll take the time to include a screenshot or a screen recording of the bug. But, sometimes the important info is what's right outside the boundaries of the screenshot – or the developer needs to know what happened right before the video? Or needs to know some info like what account you're logged in with, and if there are any errors in the console, and you can't tell that from a screenshot or video.

Debugging is the worst part of engineering - but it's not actually because of the fixing, it's all the back and forth required to reproduce & get to the debugging! This context gap should be filled by tools.

Our goal was to make it really easy for people to log bugs in a format that gives developers all the context they need, right there in the bug report.

We tried 7 different versions of Jam to solve this problem, until we landed on what it is today - a browser extension you click when you want to catch a bug.

It's basically a screen recorder, except Jam auto-captures:

• console logs
• network requests
• repro steps
• session & user details
• device & OS
• backend logs

There's some extra debug tooling in there for websockets and graphql too (we love/hate graphql, but that's besides the point.)

You can see an example of what the captured data looks like here: https://jam.dev/c/96149346-3cb1-439a-b4d0-fed8181ea036

2 years into this version of Jam, our tool is used by over 150,000 people to fix more than 5 million bugs! That's really awesome, but there's so much more to do.

We really want to build something that makes this part of the job suck less. So, I wanted to open up for discussion here and get your feedback.

Jam is free to use forever (we've got a paid plan for companies who need it, but we will always keep a large free plan - after all, we learned to build products at Cloudflare).

I hope you'll check it out and let us know what you think: https://jam.dev

My email is dani@jam.dev, feel free to reach out anytime.

By the way, we're hiring engineers and if making debugging a lot more efficient is a problem that excites you, we'd love to chat: jam.dev/careers