Logs as UX

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 A few years ago, Ryan wrote about how Bridgy, a service I use a lot, exposes log as the end user UI. This is a post that's stuck with me over the years, especially as someone whose work has generally comprised of building tools for others. I think about this post every so often with how in Renovate, our logs are the interface that users, operators, and support teams get into understanding what's going on under the hood. More generally, I think that focussing on your user-facing logs can be a key area to improve the experience for users of your software. (This make sense for a subset of applications - if you're building a SAAS platform or a mobile app, you may have different avenues to expose this information) They're there 🤷 At the laziest level, it's pretty likely that the software you're using already has logs available - often to be provided to the vendor to help support your usage. These logs are often written to disk in plain text,…