Making shell history magical with Atuin (Changelog Interviews #579)
Feb 21, 2024
auto_awesome
Ellie Huxtable, creator of Atuin, talks about syncing shell history, liking Rust, branding/marketing the project, quitting job for full-time work, business model & more. Also, discussions on shell apps, event streaming evolution, quitting job for side project, RVM evolution, convenience in service use, building community & syncing developer environments.
A2win tool syncs shell history across machines for easier command recall and reuse.
NATS gaining popularity for cost-effective event streaming over Kafka due to simplicity and advantages.
Atuin terminal tool enhances command line experience with history, stats, and user-friendly features.
Deep dives
Enhanced Product Platform: Faster, Better, and Smarter
Century is investing in its product platform with the goal of making it faster and better. They have introduced a new metrics offering, allowing developers to define custom metrics and monitor app performance in relation to business measures and customer experiences. Additionally, Century aims to make their product smarter by incorporating artificial intelligence. They want to understand developers' needs and prioritize relevant issues while reducing noise and automatically resolving non-critical problems.
Improved Developer Experience for Mobile Developers
Century is focusing on enhancing the experience for mobile developers. They are developing features that allow mobile developers to see end-user sessions, helping them identify and fix issues quickly. Additionally, they are working on performance capabilities to monitor app speed and improve overall performance. These improvements aim to streamline the debugging and development process for mobile developers.
Ellie Huxable's Open Source Tool for Shell History
Ellie Huxable has created a powerful open source tool called A2win, which enhances the functionality and search capabilities of the shell history. A2win enables syncing of shell history across multiple machines, making it easier for users to recall and reuse commands. It provides a more user-friendly interface compared to the default shell history search options. A2win has gained popularity among developers and has been positively received by the community as a valuable addition to their workflow.
NATS vs. Kafka: A Comparison
NATS, an event streaming solution, is gaining traction as an alternative to Kafka due to its advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and ease of use. While Kafka was the pioneer in persistent data streaming, it comes with operational complexities and high maintenance costs. On the other hand, NATS offers subject-based addressing and a more granular approach to message delivery. With the introduction of persistence through the JetStream subsystem, many users have expressed interest in replacing their Kafka deployments with NATS. The shift towards NATS is driven by its ability to simplify architecture, reduce costs, and provide additional benefits that Kafka lacks.
Building an Independent Terminal Tool
The Atoin terminal tool, inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, is gaining popularity among developers. Atoin aims to enhance the command line experience by providing features like history, stats, and improved search capabilities. Users have praised its seamless setup process, hand-holding documentation, and the overall trust it inspires. Although trust-building has been a challenge for requiring registration, the core functionalities of Atoin without the syncing feature have attracted users. To address this concern, the developer is considering offering a smooth path to enjoy the tool's usefulness before requiring registration or self-hosting. Atoin's creator appreciates the community's support, feedback, and word-of-mouth promotion as the tool continues to evolve and adapt to meet user needs.
Today we speak with Ellie Huxtable, the creator of a magical open source tool for syncing, searching & backing up your shell history. Along the way we learn all about the sync service, why she likes Rust, the branding / marketing of the project, how she quit her job to work on it full time, the business model & so much more.
Changelog++ members save 13 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Sentry – Launch week! New features and products all week long (so get comfy)! Tune in to Sentry’s YouTube and Discord daily at 9am PT to hear the latest scoop. Too busy? No problem - enter your email address to receive all the announcements (and win swag along the way). Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Synadia – Take NATS to the next level via a global, multi-cloud, multi-geo and extensible service, fully managed by Synadia. They take care of all the infrastructure, management, monitoring, and maintenance for you so you can focus on building exceptional distributed applications.
imgproxy – imgproxy is open source an optimizes images for the web on the fly. It makes websites and apps blazing fast while saving storage and SaaS costs. It uses the world’s fastest image processing library under the hood — libvips. It is screaming fast and has a tiny memory footprint.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
