EnaLog June Update

I’ve never written one of these before so please bear with me if it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m hoping I’ll get around to writing one of these every month, but only time will tell whether that will actually happen. So I’m going to talk about what we have done and why we did it, and then finally share and insight into what we’re planning to do in the next 1-3 months. Some of these things may have been shipped in May but I’ll throw them in here to bring some more visibility. So here is what we’ve actually done:

Feature Flags

Our headline for June was the arrival of Feature Flags. If you’re not sure what feature flags are then we’ve posted a number of articles on what they are and their benefits over on the EnaLog Blog.

In short, we’ve wanted to add feature flags functionality to EnaLog ever since we started working on it. It’s been in the backlog since day 1, and finally six months later it’s here. It allows EnaLog users to rollout a specific feature to a percentage of users in their applications. We’ve tried to make the setup as easy as possible but we think there is even more room for improvement down the line but here is a quick guide on how they work.

  1. EnaLog user creates a new flag in the dashboard and selects the percentage of users to show the feature to
  2. Using one of the EnaLog SDKs our users then check if their user should be shown the feature or not using checkFeature function (check_feature for Python)
  3. The checkFeature function will return true if the user should be shown the feature or false if they shouldn’t

Here is a code example of the above in Python:

from enalog import EnaLog

enalog_client = EnaLog(api_token=<insert_api_token>)
is_feature_enabled = enalog_client.check_feature(feature='test-feature', user_id=<your_internal_user_id>)

if is_feature_enabled:
    """Show user shiny new feature"""

Since we shipped feature flags we’ve added the ability to easily pause a flag and reset the metrics. And we plan to ship more features and improvements in the coming months.

Funnels

EnaLog already has the capability to chart metrics in the format of a counter, line or bar charts but in June we also added Funnel graphs which allow users to chart metrics across a user funnel or flow. This is a pretty large advancement for us as it our first really analytical chart which we plan to expand so much more with.

First Community Built SDK

This one came right at the end of June and crossed over into the beginning of July but we had V1 of our first community built SDK which is EnaLog Swift by Joe Barbour.

Joe is a user of EnaLog and reached out to myself on Twitter asking about a SDK for Swift and whether we wanted to incorporate it into EnaLog, which of course we did! Joe wrote some great code and great documentation for the SDK and in return we offered him a discount for his hard work which he uses to track events in his product SprintDock. We’re super happy to have our first community built SDK and hope to see more from our amazing community!

What’s Next?

The next three months are going to see EnaLog continue to evolve massively. Here is three things we’re planning to work on.

  1. We’re going to ship a new version of our documentation which will bring the content into our landing page repository and allow us to keep it on brand
  2. We’re planning to produce at least two new SDKs for PHP and Rust
  3. We want to build a proof of concept for A/B testing in EnaLog. A really popular feature for product analytics and an even more useful tool for software teams which we feel we can create a great user experience for.

We do have more on the way but for the moment they’re top secret!

Wrapping up

June was a great month, we shipped great features, learned a lot and grew as a business. See you back here for the July update!