Making Beautiful API Keys
tl;dr - Since developers are our customers, we wanted them to have beautiful API keys. We couldn't find a suitable standard solution so we made our own package - uuidkey - that you can use to encode & format UUIDs into human-readable keys. If you use UUIDv7, you can also decode the keys to store them as sortable, indexable IDs in your database.
API keys are a large part of a user's first interaction with our product, and we want to make a good impression. We want to make our keys look good and "feel" good, but there seems to be no "good" standard in the industry.
We are a busy startup, but we are also a developer-first platform company. Therefore, we thought it made sense to put some time, thought and effort into figuring out a solution we (and hopefully our developers) would be happy with.
Unfortunately, most API keys are ugly. They're often just random strings of characters with inconsistent formatting, making them hard to read, sort, and identify.
