📢 Say Hello to emoji-logger: Expressive Logging for Kotlin and Spring

If you’ve ever stared at a wall of identical log lines during debugging and wished your logs could speak more clearly — or even be a little less dull — you’re going to like this.

Today, I’m excited to announce emoji-logger, a Kotlin, SLF4J-compatible logging library designed to bring clarity, structure, and a little joy to your logs.

🧠 Why Another Logging Library?

Most apps use SLF4J or Logback under the hood — and for good reason. But raw logging has some rough edges:

• Important events blend into the noise
• You lose track of which context (user, request, job) logged what
• Your log format might be consistent… but not expressive

emoji-logger was built to help with all that — without replacing your existing logging infrastructure.

✨ What Does emoji-logger Add?

• ✅ Emoji log symbols for quick scanning and visual separation
• 🧵 MDC helpers to add structured context (like userId or requestId) without boilerplate
• 🛠️ DSL-style syntax so logs read like expressive statements, not Java plumbing
• 🧩 Spring Boot auto-integration (if you want it)

🧪 A Few Examples

logger.info(LogSymbol.GREEN_TICK, "Everything worked!")

logger.withMdc("userId" to "abc123") {
    logger.debug(LogSymbol.USER, "Fetched profile")
}

emojiLog(LogSymbol.BUG) { "Unexpected null response" }

Or DSL-style:

LOG_DB log "Query executed"
LOG_HANDLER logFormat ("Saved {}" to arrayOf("user"))

⚙️ Works With What You Already Use

emoji-logger is designed to layer cleanly on top of SLF4J. You don’t need to change your logback setup, log format, or core dependencies.

It also plays nicely with:

• Spring Boot (auto-config optional)
• Kotlin coroutines (with coroutine-aware withMdcSuspend)
• Java (fully interoperable with Logger and MDC)

🧰 When Should You Use It?

If you’re building:

• Kotlin microservices
• Spring Boot backends
• CLI tools or schedulers
• Apps where log clarity matters

…emoji-logger can help you surface the signal, tag the noise, and make your logs actually pleasant to read.

🧪 Try It Out

Soon yow will just Add the library:

implementation("tech.robd:emoji-logger:x.y.z")

Then get logging:

val logger = EmojiLogger.get<MyService>()
logger.info(LogSymbol.STARTUP, "App starting")

🙌 Final Thoughts

Logging doesn’t have to be boring. With emoji-logger, your logs can be structured, expressive, and — dare I say — joyful.

Give it a ⭐️ on GitHub, try it out in your next Kotlin project, and let me know what you think.

Happy logging! — Rob