Software Engineer
The original version of this story was published on the .
Buckle up! On this episode of , Sydney Palumbo and Emre Sonmez, engineers at , drove by to chat about Smartcar, a platform that helps developers create apps that communicate with vehicles. Watch the episode, and then shift gears to let Sydney and Emre guide you through Smartcar’s delightfully simple process.
Smartcar is a standard API for connected vehicles. We enable web and mobile app communication with cars (think “lock doors” or “check odometer”) across multiple brands, without any hardware.
So what does that actually mean?
Let’s say you wanted to build a simple iOS app to share your car keys with your friends. Here’s how you’d do that:
Now, this is how things should work. But as we all know, things can go wrong. And when things go wrong, we want to quickly resolve the issue to keep our developers happy. Here’s where Sentry comes in.
When someone makes an API request to us (to get a vehicle’s location, for example), we figure out what brand and model the car is and retrieve that data point from the car using our integrations with car brands. A lot could happen when we attempt to retrieve this info:
These types of issues are to be expected with large, complex, moving objects. However, if any of these three things occur, our process is to (a) investigate the issue as soon as possible, (b) notify our developers that have been affected if the issue is severe, and (c) resolve the issue.
When an error occurs, Sentry provides us the stack trace, release, car brand, and source of the request — which allows our team to investigate, resolve, and notify developers of the issue as fast as possible.
When you first create a developer account (for example, to run our demo app), we generate a client ID and secret for your application. This process is a necessary step to make your first request to the Smartcar API. If a developer experiences an error in our React app while registering their application or updating their configuration, we want to identify who the user is and make sure they can successfully use our API as soon as possible.
At Smartcar, we focus heavily on minimizing the time it takes for a developer to log in to our dashboard, register an application, and make their first request to our API. Sentry enables us to quickly detect errors and see the actions the user took that lead to the error.
Want to check out the Smartcar API? Create an account, run our demo, and let us know what you think! 🚀
PS: Follow us on and Facebook!
Smartcar is the easiest way to integrate mobility apps and services with cars.