Emojis - A picture paints a thousand words
6 minute read
Alex Batoryk-Leliw
Emojis need not be limited to reacting to messages, texting or being the concept of films. They can have real use application within software development. Most of the use cases here are based around the concept of glance for context. In essence, how can a user identify in the shortest amount of time the context of something.
Let's take a 👀 at some of the ways they can be utilised in general and some ways we use them at Countingup!
Logging 🪵
What better way to start. We've all been there... trawling through code logs to find something, perhaps whilst debugging an error or validating some behaviour is working correctly.
As they have evolved, emojis can mean different things to different people. This is unavoidable. However, with a common understanding of some of the more generic ones, we can use them in this manner. Here is a list of examples we could use in the context of logging.
| Emoji | Usage |
|---|---|
| 🔥 | This surely needs no introduction.. There's a fire in the building.. Something terrible has happened! |
| ⚠️ | Warning, something potentially has/will happen.. |
| ✅ | Success! You love to see it. |
| ⏰ | Is it that time already? Perhaps a process or job has just been scheduled |
| ⏸ | Pause? Something has paused.. possibly a scheduled job or an ongoing process |
| 🏁 | Finish! We've performed a task or job that has successfully finished. Works just as well as the success! |
| ❌ | Cancelled! Perhaps Manually? |
This is especially useful if you have production code with a centralised logging system. Being able to search using emojis can take the opacity away from trying to find what you're looking for. At Countingup, we have distributed systems, but maintain a centralised logging system, which all the more helps to distinguish, especially if you search by service and emoji 😁!
Just make sure if you are using a third-party provider to store logs that they are fully compatible!!
Make sense? 👍 or 👎? Ultimately each team will have a differing perspective on whether it works or not and that's ok. What is important is consistency within the team. If confusion occurs, perhaps stick to the basic and well-known ones and don't add too many potentially confusing emojis 🤷♂️.
Marketing ✉️
Since almost all of us use emojis in some form of another outside of work, it can be quite effective to use in marketing. Natural language is a great tool to market and the more emojis that have seeped into it the more effective they are. Emojis also have the distinct attribute of being universal, so there's no langauge barrier between sending someone an email from any langauge to any part of the world!
At Countingup, we use Braze (this in not a paid sponsor) to perform multichannel marketing using our backend services, mobile-app and web apps.
Emails, texts and push notifications are all good candidates for this sort of natural language marketing. Especially when you need to be snappy like in a push notification!
There are a million articles on this topic. Some I'd suggest are worth a read are:
Version control 👨💻
There's plenty to unpack here! Continuing the theme of using natural langauge (and a mixture of emojis) we can use them for things like documentation and even commit messages!
Again we can use this to identify and find at a glance the context of changes, but perhaps in a slightly different manner.
This can be very effective if there's a clear indication of what each message type represents. For example design (🎨), bugfixes (🐛) and package updates (📦).
Emojis in documentation has been long used to great effect. Expo does a great job of using them in the table of contents.
Again though the use of these is a question of choice and effectiveness, use at your discretion!
Communication 🗣
There's no I in Team and there's no Emoji in Communication however it has really become a given to how we communicate with each other
in life. It therefore makes complete sense to do so in a friendly work environment too. I certainly don't need to give a lesson in messaging
or communication, but here's a great example of emojis in action at Countingup.
It's all a bit of fun, but it's very effective at it's albeit small job!
As a slightly unrelated side note, we also frequently use GIFs at Countingup. Shoutout to the canideploy blog which utilises gifs to notify everyone of impending production deployments.
Summary
I've either re-affirmed your commitment to using emojis or expanded your horizons a bit, or not, but either way ultimately it's a bit of fun. Hopefully I've shown some ways that they can also be used effectively and productively to portray a quick message or in some cases more useful interactions.
These are just a few examples, but the scope is endless! With ever-increasing compatability and usage within the tech community, there are clear use cases which allow for real productivity! 🥰