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I quit my job to work full time on my open source project

637 pointsby cwafflesover 1 year ago

43 comments

lanzaover 1 year ago
I love the idea of Atuin but it&#x27;s just way too slow with large history files. I&#x27;ve synced my history on my own for the past decade and have like 170k lines and the history search the ctrl-r search just crawls.<p>I don&#x27;t need most of the history, but there&#x27;s 0 chance in hell I&#x27;m auditing that many lines to decide what I need and what I don&#x27;t need.
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cwafflesover 1 year ago
Atuin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atuin.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atuin.sh&#x2F;</a><p>Note: I am a user, and not the author (Ellie Huxtable)
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motoxproover 1 year ago
What should I be using shell history for? I&#x27;ve never wanted to go back in my history but obviously people are getting a lot of value from it.
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ilakshover 1 year ago
Has anyone who uses fish shell compared that to Atuin? I suspect that having my entire shell history accessible might not really be necessary.
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LanzVonLover 1 year ago
I think it&#x27;s great to see more women moving into full time open source careers. We don&#x27;t have many!
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outcoldmanover 1 year ago
I keep my shell history in sqlite database since 2017. Around 120k records at this point. Never synced history from the work laptops. Only personal history.<p>In 2017 wrote my own bash script (later optimized for zsh) to just record everything in sqlite with hooks on prompt. [1]<p>I mostly work right now on Mac, don&#x27;t need to support Linux anymore, so wrote an app for Mac, that syncs the history over iCloud, and has a GUI interface. [2]<p>Anyway, storing years of shell history somewhere, where you can do complex searches, and actually find some magic command you run a few years ago, is priceless.<p>- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.outcoldman.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;dbhist&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.outcoldman.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;19&#x2F;dbhist&#x2F;</a><p>- [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loshadki.app&#x2F;shellhistory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;loshadki.app&#x2F;shellhistory&#x2F;</a>
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hiqover 1 year ago
I have some local setup replicating what Atuin does, but I&#x27;m realizing I don&#x27;t use it at all even though I thought it&#x27;d be useful, and I don&#x27;t use my shell history much overall. I have an alias &quot;aled&quot; to edit my aliases quickly, so it&#x27;s easy for me to add new ones, and that&#x27;s where I put the commands I want to use regularly, or even the ones I&#x27;d like to be able to find if I ever need them again in years. It&#x27;s easier to add documentation in a .zshrc than in a shell history in any case.<p>Global aliases (which you can use anywhere, not only at the beginning) are also nice to compose aliases with each other.
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ram_rarover 1 year ago
I&#x27;m curious about the calculus involved in dedicating oneself to a full-time open-source project. Could someone with prior experience share insights on generating income or potential future exits solely through open-source contributions?
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zubairqover 1 year ago
I like all these new use cases for SQLite, which appears to be a new platform itself
alexchantavyover 1 year ago
Anyone know what were the big inflection points in 2022 and 2023 for star growth?
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darkteflonover 1 year ago
Said this last time Atuin popped up, but absolutely love it. I’m by no means a power user but there’s just something so elegant about the UX of combined shell history across multiple machines.
tra3over 1 year ago
Best of luck. I hope there&#x27;s a path forward where open source can provide a reasonable income stream.<p>I maintain a couple of open source package for emacs -- it&#x27;s a labour of love. I&#x27;m happy to help folks with their issues, but it&#x27;s easy to say &quot;sorry, I don&#x27;t have capacity to add this feature&quot; or &quot;no, I don&#x27;t think this is a good fit for the project&quot;. If I depended on this for money.. well this would change the whole approach, wouldn&#x27;t it?
sireatover 1 year ago
Does Atuin offer ability to save current path (with timestamp as a bonus) for the command as well?<p>Looking at OP it looks like it does &quot; recording additional command context&quot;<p>Often (meaning once every few months) I have to SSH to some less used machines and remember a few incantations where path and time is crucial.<p>In bash there is a hacky way to add current path and timestamp to history, but I&#x27;ve never gotten it to work exactly right. If you add timestamp then it seems to duplicate the timestamp when you repeat the command.
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bsnnkvover 1 year ago
TIL about Atuin!<p>I just deployed this to my &quot;everything&quot; NixOS server with `services.atuin.enable` and synced a few of my machines up with it. Very cool! I hope this move goes well for Ellie!
hakcermaniover 1 year ago
Not the amazing utility Atuin is .. but have been using this tiny bash script to manage named history files that i find pretty useful when juggling between projects. Have to try out Atuin and see if it is easier to use. .. sharing the gist .. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;appsmatics&#x2F;ff27e885460bd345eabe1c5f70c4438b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;appsmatics&#x2F;ff27e885460bd345eabe1c5f7...</a>
poidosover 1 year ago
atuin is awesome! I self-host with 0 problems across my machines.
ptekover 1 year ago
Nice Website \o&#x2F;, Dark mode, simple layout on the side (which I might steal) so I could click on the &quot;Notes&quot; part, loads fast<p>3 Trackers with EFF Privacy badger.<p>Best of luck Ellie :o)
jorisborisover 1 year ago
Off-topic: there is a “wtf” domain extension?!
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lepetitchefover 1 year ago
All the best Ellie. I use atuin and never miss any command from my past session.<p>The only feedback I want to call out is sometimes when I close the terminal tab, the atuin server may run in the background and I got a warning message.
firecallover 1 year ago
Good luck!<p>The product is great, and I discovered it just the other day!<p>Via the Console email news letter I think! :-)
thesurlydevover 1 year ago
Logging into another machine just to get a long command resonated with me and is enough that I&#x27;ve decided to give it a try. That, and I&#x27;m a sucker for tools written in Rust :)
souvlakeeover 1 year ago
Is it possible to sync existing shell history? Fish history, precisely.
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brundolfover 1 year ago
I&#x27;m curious to hear what people&#x27;s usecases are for retaining long shell history. For myself, I never really use it beyond the current work day (up arrow)
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da39a3eeover 1 year ago
I use this and it&#x27;s been fantastic and rock solid; (I&#x27;ve been using Unix shells intensively for 15 years, started using it 1 year ago and never looked back).
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g-b-rover 1 year ago
Standard shell history searching is so bad, a good version of that would already be a huge leap for most people
bdhcuidbebeover 1 year ago
im one of those who disable shell history persistance, since i first found peoples user folders on misconfigured apache servers in the 90s, complete with .bash_history containing passwords and hostnames.<p>dont recall i needed to dig up old commands typed, like ever.<p>i dont think this one is for me, but good luck!
fuddleover 1 year ago
I&#x27;d be interested to hear how you plan to approach licensing for the premium hosted features?
k3vinwover 1 year ago
You’re my hero, Ellie! Congratulations on your success and best wishes for the future.
the_arunover 1 year ago
What is the security of this?<p>1. If someone steals my laptop &amp; breaks in, can they get access to all my history<p>2. After breaking, if they run `atuin key` will get them the key for my history which they can use from any device (if they know the userid)<p>3. If you are running servers passing passwords as command line arguments in that device, they have all that.
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chaxorover 1 year ago
Why does it have kubernetes?
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prakhar897over 1 year ago
Does fig.io have this feature?
nonameiguessover 1 year ago
I think she is tackling a problem here that can&#x27;t be solved by another tool, no matter how good it is. Thus, ever getting enough people to pay for it will be tough.<p>The issue isn&#x27;t &quot;I can&#x27;t remember how to run a command I just ran.&quot; The issue is that the universe of CLI tooling you use is too large, too inconsistent, and too complex to remember how to use them all. Conventions may be wildly different between Windows and Unix, BSD and GNU, many tools have existed for over 50 years now and have accumulated enormous feature creep. Many newer tools try to improve upon perceived complexity of past tools, but by being different, they introduce even more complexity into the overall set of tools for anyone who can&#x27;t abandon the past tools. There are huge debates about environment variables, config file formats, whether parameters should use one dash or two, what even <i>is</i> a parameter versus an argument versus a flag, how a tool should use STDOUT versus STDERR, how it should use exit codes, whether output should be structured or free text, and nobody agrees on the answers. There is very little standardization, and where standards exist, you can&#x27;t count on anything to actually follow these.<p>Contrasts these with the tools of a painter or wordworker. They&#x27;re similar enough that learning to paint in high school art class will transfer muscle memory near perfectly to every brush and surface you ever use for the rest of your life. Creating a tool like this is throwing up your hands and saying no human can ever hope to remember how to use their tools, so they need an additional tool that remembers for them. But now we also need to remember how to query this memory augmenter, so you&#x27;ve introduced yet another thing to learn for anyone who isn&#x27;t willing to just stop trying to learn other tools at all and rely 100% on yours.<p>It isn&#x27;t to say it can&#x27;t be useful, but you&#x27;re trying to solve an ecosystem problem with a tool. You can&#x27;t. At best, you can alleviate a tiny portion of the difficulty for a very small number of users sufficiently similar to you. Then you run into the culture of not having to pay for these things mentioned elsewhere. On systems like Windows and Mac, they may be paid systems, but once you pay, you automatically the full suite of system utilities and CLI tooling. BSD and GNU were free creations made largely by university professors and industy professionals in their spare time for the purpose of sharing, not for making money. Fair or not, the expectation became and will likely remain that these tools either come as part of a larger package, or they&#x27;re donated from the spare time of their own users.<p>Exceptions are few and far between. You&#x27;ve got things like curl and openssl that sustain themselves reasonably well as open source CLI packages, but even those don&#x27;t charge for the tool itself. They only succeed because they&#x27;re so ubiquitous that if a barely perceptible proportion of users ever donate or pay for support, that is still enough. That model doesn&#x27;t work if your userbase isn&#x27;t virtually the entire world of computing.
bad_userover 1 year ago
This is the dream for many of us, but I hope she comes up with a good business model that doesn&#x27;t rely on the goodwill of people (e.g., open core) because FOSS is terrible for earning money. The reason is that FOSS is essentially part of the commons, but without being maintained by taxes.<p>In general, people just want free stuff, companies rarely pay for support, and SaaS providers will steal your business if they can. I can think of several apps that macOS users are paying for, such as Bartender, Alfred, or MailMate. Clearly, there&#x27;s a market for utilities, but only with scarcity.
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cturover 1 year ago
While I doubt I&#x27;d quit my day job for it, over the past couple of years I&#x27;ve been poking at my own database-backed shell history. The key requirements for me were that it be extremely fast and that it support syncing across multiple systems.<p>The former is easy(ish); the latter is trickier since I didn&#x27;t want to provide a hosted service but there aren&#x27;t easily usable APIs like s3 that are &quot;bring your own wallet&quot; that could be used. So I punted and made it directory based and compatible with Dropbox and similar shared storage.<p>Being able to quickly search history, including tricks like &#x27;show me the last 50 commands I ran in this directory that contained `git`&#x27; has been quite useful for my own workflows, and performance is quite fine on my ~400k history across multiple machines starting around 2011. (pxhist is able to import your history file so you can maintain that continuity)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chipturner&#x2F;pxhist">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chipturner&#x2F;pxhist</a>
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chaosprintover 1 year ago
I quited my job as well to work on<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org</a><p>I have a lot of feelings, but I don&#x27;t have a blog so far. I feel that universities should alloc some of their funding to many of these open source projects and open source community should be better managed rather than donation. As for me, my plan is to start my own company and work on hardware .
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elliehover 1 year ago
Hey! Author here, thanks for sharing cwaffles<p>Happy to answer any questions :)
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xialvjunover 1 year ago
I&#x27;m going to quit my job to relax. And my relax is to build some open source things.
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teddyhover 1 year ago
This person has gone from having a solid business model (having a job) to having at best a very vague one (“I hope I can focus on adding new premium hosted features for advanced users, and begin to support business usage.”).<p>You know how this sounds like, to me? “I quit my job to play with and walk my dog full time. I am hoping this will give me time to develop skills to eventually earn some money by maybe walking other people’s dogs, or maybe doing public performances with my dog.”
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ukd1over 1 year ago
Eventually I suspect someone will abuse this for the free (and encrypted) storage, and then they&#x27;ll have to fight that battle, which won&#x27;t be fun, and likely end up charging. Probably should start charging for storage sooner rather than later, and just allow self hosting free.
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ndygover 1 year ago
This is fantastic. I&#x27;d love to live in a world populated by tens of thousands of incredible, practical projects like Atuin, whose maintainers earn a good living. Best of luck, Ellie!
pull_my_fingerover 1 year ago
Bold move given the current job market. Always a risk, but seems especially so in 2024. Hope it works out!
spiral09over 1 year ago
Yeah it&#x27;s blocked, how to check if sites are blocked
tpmp313459over 1 year ago
open sourcing is utter waste of time. What do you still working for a big coporates companies in free of cost. This is how 70% of open sourcing literally works. You work for developers who are working in firms and often firms also fork your projects. Before 4 years I&#x27;ve inspected iOS whats app bundle they were used lot of open source projects. I am not about contributing to Linux Systems indeed projects copied by Apple &amp; Windows bussiness.<p>If you do open source work for like Linux, Server or watever which is already avaiable in high cost, then It could be considerable as great hobby. Open sourcing the innovtive, invensitions aren&#x27;t good in software industries they are remains fee by commericial firms. All your intentions just go waste. Most of people see this comment negative. The other side, One day come, major jobloss will directly affect you as well even you have settled well. You will understand!
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