I’m going to share my experience building , an open-source realtime logging tool for node.js, specifically solving a pain for the community. now-logs now 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 , is the focus on DX and how it makes me feel. Every tool I use . The creators invested a lot of thought into every small detail and it shows. now makes me feel happy and smart I decided to have DX as a main feature of . I wanted it to feel like , be and to use. now-logs magic fast to integrate super simple 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 with a magical one liner: now-logs 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. and get us back to the terminal where we belong. Let’s fix that Fortunately, creating command line tools in node.js is a breeze. is a super simple command line tool: now-logs 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 was directed to the ’s copy, the and the output of the cli tool. now-logs website GitHub README.md usage now-logs The website is both a demo and tutorial so within 1 minute you should know if you should be using or not. now-logs Checkout find me on Twitter ( ). now-logs ketacode
