3 Lessons about DX from building “now-logs”

I’m going to share my experience building now-logs, an open-source realtime logging tool for node.js, specifically solving a pain for the now community.

Developer Experience (DX)

My definition for DX is simple:

“DX is how developers feel while using your tools, code and APIs”

The thing I am most impressed with working with now, is the focus on DX and how it makes me feel. Every tool I use makes me feel happy and smart. The creators invested a lot of thought into every small detail and it shows.

I decided to have DX as a main feature of now-logs. I wanted it to feel like magic, be fast to integrate and super simple to use.

In the end, 3 things made the DX great:

1. Killing the sign-up process

Developers just want to start using a tool without signing up for a service. However, services usually require you to sign up to get your private API_KEY. Let’s remove this step so developers can jump straight to code.

In order to avoid a signup step, developers can just come up with their own API_KEY and use that. If chosen wisely, there should be no collisions.

Now you can start using now-logs with a magical one liner:

require(‘now-logs’)(‘the-api-key-i-came-up-with’);

2. Not inventing new workflows

Developers are viewing logs in their terminal, but all 3rd party logging solutions requires you to login to a website to see the logs.

Let’s fix that and get us back to the terminal where we belong.

Fortunately, creating command line tools in node.js is a breeze. now-logs is a super simple command line tool:

now-logs the-api-key-i-came-up-with

With this in your terminal, feel free to pipe (|) and direct (>) your output to other programs. This makes me feel at home.

3. Investing in website & documentation

A good website can have enormous impact on the usage of tools and open source libraries.

About 1/2 of the effort building now-logs was directed to the website’s copy, the GitHub README.md and the usage output of the now-logs cli tool.

The website is both a demo and tutorial so within 1 minute you should know if you should be using now-logs or not.

Checkout now-logsfind me on Twitter (ketacode).