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Comment by stitched2gethr | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is an unpopular opinion given the existing comments, but I don't get it. They spent time and energy on this instead of writing features or fixing bugs and I don't think it matters at all. The only interaction I have with my API keys is copying them from one place to another. If I need to manually identify a key then putting the first or last few chars, whatever they are, in my working memory is more than sufficient.

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Not only the development of the key format, but the post itself could have been 3 lines (with the leading example):

  38QARV0-1ET0G6Z-2CJD9VA-2ZZAR0X

  1. Use UUIDv7 as the base ID to leverage timestamps
  2. Encode the ID using Crockford Base32 for readability
  3. Add artfully placed dashes for aesthetics

It seems to me like an exercise in persuasion like how Steve Jobs was sold on the idea of the NeXT logo by Paul Rand[0]. I myself prefer good ideas to be self-evident, but I tend to underestimate the value of salesmanship.

[0] https://modernspecies.com/blog/post/understanding-the-200k-l...

Agreed. I cant see why anyone thinks this was worth spending time on rather than just using the standards which everybody else does.

Nobody types out api keys so there is no need to make them friendly to say or remember. After you have copied and pasted them once into your db, you are never going to seee or use that string again!

Totally worth spending a single day at some hackathon or slack time event... but not more. And it looks like a lot more.

Does it? We once discussed making our ids (UUIDs) prettier, came to the same conclusion of using some base64 variant in 5 minutes, and came across base32 10 minutes later, and the final implementation is pretty trivial.

This is a 1 day job at most to get something polished (assuming there’s no migration/retrocompatibility constraints)

All things in moderation. I think they're correct to classify their API keys as part of their user interface. It's less like deciding the colour of the bike shed, and more like deciding whether the metal sides of the new iPhone should have a brushed or polished finish. Sure, it doesn't affect anything practical, but it may well influence how the user feels about the product. Maybe you deny having feelings about APIs but I think you'd be lying ;)

All that said, I'm not sure the juice was worth the squeeze here - I don't think their new API keys look any more beautiful than a standard UUID. I like that they cared all the same, though.

Sometimes spending engineering time for content marketing is worth more than implementing some feature that's not needed for the early adopters.

content marketing can demonstrate orgs you don't want to work for and can therein be counterproductive

Sometimes someone caring about details is what makes everything better.

Nobody is going to choose their product just because their API Keys.

But they are generating a halo effect. Is like going to a restaurant with outstanding bathrooms. If they put a lot of care in that, you immediately assume they do the same in all the other aspects of their product/service.

IMO formatting an API key string is not equal to an outstanding bathroom. Its more akin to a valve you put under the floor of the bathroom. You put it there once to make things work and you will never see it again.

Will it make you feel better to know that you have the shinier valve which looks prettier? Maybe, but nobody else will ever know and it will work just the same as the valve everyone else has in their bathroom which cost 10% of the price.

Agreed. I'll copy and paste it anyway. It's not that instead of an UUID you have "FluffCat47" that is easy to type and remember, it's a freaking UUID as well (ok, 31 characters vs 36 - saves a huuge 15% of your fingertips...)

Their customers are developers, their product is a dev tool. No different than any other company obsessing over great UX. Stripe won because of the developer experience.

Tangent, but same with Quickbooks Online. Seems most accountants and bookkeepers I have spoken to hate it, however it has a really useable api and simple callback system which makes it super attractive to developers.

No surprise then that it is the worlds most used accounting software, even though most of its users hate it.

idk why but it's something product people obsess over. I added a table in the database for our platform that used autoincrementing IDs and my boss (the CEO) sent it back to me asking to use nanoids simply because they look nicer

I totally agree. This looks like a pretty new startup too. I would be livid if my team had spent so much time on this instead of building capabilities to get the startup traction.

It looks like they wanted a reason to make a shiny blog post to get attention for their startup. Judging by the fact its on the front page of HN and we are all commenting on it, looks like they succeeded.

Yall are so dramatic.

It's a trivial library to write. 99% of it is just deciding what you want the output to look like + writing the blog post.

Yeah, the code is easy but navel-gazing and agonizing over the prettiest way to replace a long jumble of dash-separated lowercase characters with a slightly shorter jumble of dash-separated uppercase characters is an insane thing to spend any time on at all. Convince me this has any commercial value and isn't just bikeshedding.

This is just what it looks like to care about the details, though certainly a more trivial case than most.

The resistance to it is part of why most engineer-types like HNers can't build UX. They think it's all agonizing and navel-gazing, so they don't deliberate over anything. And they don't practice it, so when they see someone making deliberate UX decisions, even trivial ones, they think it must have taken a lot of time.

Good UX comes from a chain of trivial-looking decisions in isolation and a culture of caring about it.

> This is just what it looks like to care about the details

This isnt caring about the details, this is going over the top on something completely unneccessary just to get attention for it.

Not trying to be mean, but the fact that they spend that much time on ids is an indication that the team could have misplaced priorities in other regards as well.

yeah it's an unpopular opinion

I’d say, besides writing this blog post, it probably took someone about a couple of hours to look up the available options and come to a decision. If that’s true, well worth the extra thought for their customers. It takes lots of painstaking focus like that to make a great product. But yes, if they spent weeks on this it would be too much.

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