I've had the pleasure of dealing with devs who read this and decide it says "emit json formatted text to stdout and let someone else figure it out, just like it

I've had the pleasure of dealing with devs who read this and decide it says "emit json formatted text to stdout and let someone else figure it out, just like it says in some web page." The guidance is explicitly "send it to stdout and let someone else figure it out." Which is terrible advice. The words don't suggest anything else. Maybe your experience suggests maybe you should use a library and reserve the ability to serialize that data to a proper api if necessary, but that's you not the words in the 12 factor app, and some large subset of people just do the minimum necessary to get the ticket off their queue, and if that means "printf log" that's what this advice in this suggests they'll do. It's splunk's problem now! And my advice is "use a damned logging library; understand the distinction between using a networking stack and API that manages abstractions like event size and retrying and such and stdout, which offers none of that."