Exceptional Blog

We're firm believers in building software for ourselves —we know what we like: simple, clean software that focuses on the core problem, with an interface that partners aesthetic beauty with just getting out of the way to help you get your job done. What delights us should delight our customers.

That's why I want to highlight how I used Exceptional on itself today as part of my own workflow.

While chatting in Campfire, a notification from Exceptional popped up:

Here's a link to the actual exception.

I was able to diagnose this exception very quickly:

Someone had linked to a page on Exceptional that didn't exist. But rather than throwing a 404 based exception such as an ActionController::RoutingError or ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound that we would catch separately, the app is trying to call a method on nil. Never good. So I need to build a handler. This isn't very urgent. After my exclamation of shock in Campfire though, I wanted to reassure the team that it's not too big a deal. I can quickly let everyone know using comments:

Meanwhile, back in Campfire, everyone who's chatting is kept up to date on the conversation about the exception.

Finally, as I want to deal with this issue, but not straight away, I used the "Send to Lighthouse" feature to post a message to our bug-tracker, and made the exception public so that I could link it up in this post.

Using Exceptional like this helps give us a really good understanding of the way the software should work. I'm constantly questioning the ways that we solve our problems, and in my daily use both wondering how to improve the app, and already getting antsy looking forward to using the features that are already committed to our development version.

Eating our own dog-food. It helps us, it helps our customers and best of all —it's loads of fun.