🦆😲 Emoji Logging — done properly.

💖 Feedback. TL/DR: There’s a guide and code examples at the bottom.

Fixed Width Rationale for HSK1 & Emoji Logging

I’ve been studying Mandarin for the past few years. I think the secret to learning Chinese writing is training my brain to focus on all the minor details of characters called “Brush strokes”. Brush strokes are always done in a specific sequence, direction and shape, if it sounds complicated — it is! But I digress, pattern matching and puzzle solving both emit dopamine in our brains as a reward. The skill was originally intended to avoid predators (not the drone kind) about 50,000 years ago.

There are tens of thousands of characters, each stroke telling a story. Ancient Chinese is really hard, but modern Chinese known as “Pingyin” was designed to be displayed on tech devices, it’s actually a bit easier to read than English since the size of words is uniform, what we in coding call “Fixed Width” fonts. They also eliminated the strokes, so it’s like a 10,000 character alphabet (but: you don’t need ALL the characters!)

😁 Emoji is the universal version of Mandarin, it’s lazy, it’s got well known symbols for a MANY day to day activities & objects. Each symbol, just like Mandarin takes a anywhere from 2–4 bytes depending on how many you use in sequence (I won’t try to explain UTF8 in this post). Even better than Mandarin Emoji uses

I’m presently in Melbourne, Australia. Australian is also a super lazy language, if a word can be shortened it is — for example MacDonalds is universally referred to as “Maccas”. As developers we use transpilers and decorators in our code, but what about if we could shorten the code itself? AND create pretty logs too!

With cloud services like azure insight, datadog, splunk, etc. it’s critical to consider that you’re paying bandwidth egress, per-character data processing & storage, for every single character. So finding ways to enhance the quality of the data by reducing characters also makes good fiscal sense!

Did you know that when two foreign NLP (Natural Language Processing) AI’s are brought together one of the first things they end up doing is creating their own language that is frequently orders of magnitude more efficient than English!

TIP: It’s easy to access the emoji feature on your keyboard, just WINDOW+”;” and type the picture you want. I.e. “Frog” or “Bear”