Yes, ultimately I think that's the stronger underlying argument that the author fails to make clearly—when you log something, it needs to be in a machine-readab

Yes, ultimately I think that's the stronger underlying argument that the author fails to make clearly—when you log something, it needs to be in a machine-readable format so that you can aggregate that data and gain value from it, and you need a system set up to deal with it on the other end. For example, on Heroku I have access to the wonderful Librato log connector, which makes metrics as easy as `stdout.write("my-metric-name=#{whatever}")`. I would also call that a form of "fancy logging"—now my logs are automatically connected to a graphing and alerting system, with a very long retention period. Sentry is the same way—instead of logging something into the aether, you have structured data (the error payload) that's connected to a system that can bug you about errors and help you aggregate the common sources of failure. Unstructured logging can occasionally be useful, but most of the time it's just not much more than noise.