Over the past decade, Erling Gudjohnsen has used Raygun to support his role as CTO across multiple companies. Currently, he is working as CTO and investor at Attikk, an e-commerce platform based in Iceland used to exchange authenticated luxury goods. The authentication process at Attikk is rigorous, with an accuracy rate of over 99.9% on goods checked. This attention to detail stems from their desire to deliver quality experiences for their customers, and their approach to software development is no different.

A decade ago, Erling came across a much younger version of Raygun. Erling knew the importance of getting visibility into the health of his software and was looking for a solution specifically in the .NET space. After some rigorous research, he landed on Raygun and hasn’t looked back since. 

Since then, Erling has progressed his career immensely, working as CTO at a number of global organizations, and bringing Raygun with him every step of the way. Prior to working in management, Erling was a developer for over 20 years, so it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about software development. Raygun has grown a lot since these days, too, with a decade worth of feature releases under our belt. 

So what has made Erling stick with Raygun over all these years? When we asked Erling, he replied:

"At the core, the reason is one, pricing, and two, it does what it's supposed to do."

Fundamentally, Raygun aims to help every software team make their product “do what it’s supposed to do”, without the distractions of bugs, errors, and performance issues. Raygun has fulfilled its promise of providing visibility into the health of Erling’s software for over a decade.  

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Delivering seamless e-commerce experiences

“No matter how good of a developer you think you are, your users always find a way to encounter bugs or errors that you otherwise would not know about. Users always find a way to break something that you never expected them to be able to break.”

"I want to keep the error count as low as I possibly can. Raygun really helps me spot the errors that I missed."

“Errors are a bad customer experience. So with any kind of interface where you want the customer to go through some kind of flow, you don't want them to encounter errors because that's just going to infuriate them, it's going to make them not come back, et cetera.”

“For at least a week after a deployment, I keep track of any crashes that are occurring, especially if I’m doing large changes in the checkout, as I did a week ago.”

“Anything checkout-related is going to be a fatal flaw. The customer not being able to add to cart, view the cart, edit the cart, or any other kind of interaction in the checkout process is definitely going to be fatal. But there are, of course, so many other important factors. Just the action of searching or displaying the search results, I mean anything can, of course, be a fatal flaw if it frustrates the customer enough.”

“In e-commerce, it's going to be a make-or-break situation. I mean, you don't trust a checkout process with your credit card details if they can't keep errors out of it.”

"Avoiding errors that impact the user experience and ruin the relationship with your customer is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to retain customers and grow your business."

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Prioritizing resources to drive innovation

“As CTOs, we're always going to be extremely busy, although we may touch development less and less every day. I think Raygun is a great tool to avoid spending all your time trying to figure out what or where an error is. The tool gives you more time to focus on growth and new development.”

“I really like the fact that Raygun shows both the count and the number of users that actually encountered an error, because if it's only a single user that it's occurring for, I would say it is a lower priority.”

“If you have multiple users that it's happening to, it's most definitely more significant. I'm not saying you shouldn't fix the error in regards to the single user, but it's quite more obvious usually with multiple users that, that one is a higher priority.”

“As a software developer, if you don't take this proactive approach, you're going to end up with a code base that is going to be almost ruined in the end. And you're going to have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions to actually rewrite your entire platform because it's going to be more cost-effective than actually repairing everything.”

“But when taking a proactive approach in regards to resolving errors, I try to keep at least 10, maybe 20% of that team fixing bugs in the system.”

“That developer, maybe that week or that day, they handle communications with support or with sales and marketing in regards to any issues that might be code-related. They go into Raygun, they are looking at the users, the error counts, et cetera. They are figuring out what it is that is causing these errors or these issues. So taking this approach, you are sanitizing the code; you are making sure everything is running fine. I think this is just one of the processes you should always be doing with development.”

"Raygun definitely helps me do my job more effectively."

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What’s next?

Attikk is now at the stage where they’re building a range of new features and introducing changes to grow and develop their revenue from their current customer base. They’re also looking for more revenue streams.

"Raygun is going to be a huge factor in that regard because a lot of these new revenue streams are going to come from the online environment."

Raygun is excited to continue supporting Erling and the team at Attikk to deliver superior e-commerce experiences to their customers. 

"I've had a great decade of Raygun."

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