This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.

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Sponsors:

• Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
• FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/
• Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

• Will McGugan – Twitter, GitHub
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Textualize.io
• Textualize is Hiring!
• Textualize/textual
• Projects using Textual
• Textualize/rich
• Projects using Rich

Something missing or broken? interviews-511.md">PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog(01:10) - Sponsor: Square(02:03) - Start the show!(02:23) - The Terminal as a Platform(05:00) - A tool to deliver software(06:02) - How long have you been working on this?(06:56) - What's the markup, style, and interaction syntax?(08:24) - Launching and distributing Terminal applications(11:21) - Textual apps are very much like web apps(17:29) - Could this replace not so good web admin views?(22:47) - Sponsor: FireHydrant(24:05) - Step 1 of making a TUI with Textual(28:32) - Distributing a Python app can be hard(30:55) - Default Python version issues?(33:03) - Does Textual have routes like a web app?(38:32) - Textual apps in production now?(40:09) - To be a user do I need to be a developer?(46:11) - Sponsor: Sourcegraph(48:33) - Big picture and business model(51:49) - Adam is surprised by Will's business model(53:26) - Two rendering destinations(54:59) - Why is this model the best business model?(56:57) - What's the size of this market?(57:45) - How much web dev do you have to know?(1:00:44) - Moving from JavaScript to Python(1:02:49) - Are you hiring?(1:03:39) - Building in public(1:06:50) - This is Will's plan b(1:08:22) - Most excting and most scary part of this plan?(1:10:12) - Closing out the show(1:11:18) - Outro