Coming to asciinema near you (Interview)

This week we’re joined by Marcin Kulik to talk about his project asciinema. You’ve likely seen this out there in the wild — asciinema lets you record and share your terminal sessions in full fidelity. Forget screen recording apps that offer blurry video. asciinema provides a lightweight, text-based approach to terminal recording with lots of possibilities. Marcin shares the backstory on this project, where he’d like to take it, who’s supporting him along the way, and we even included 11 minutes of bonus content for Changelog ++ subscribers.

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Changelog++ members get a bonus 10 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month.
• .Tech Domains – They’re giving selected startups guest spots on the biggest podcasts, conferences, and billboards in the tech game. Apply at startups.tech/changelog
• Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You iterlly can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

• Marcin Kulik – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• asciinema.org
• Sponsor Marcin on GitHub Sponsors
• agg - asciinema gif generator
• Star Wars: Episode IV

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:20) - Sponsor: Statsig
(04:46) - Start the show!
(08:00) - Twelve years is a long time (ago)
(13:21) - Really cool tech (they're not videos!)
(17:02) - Does it record literally everything?
(19:04) - It even caputures the delay
(23:16) - You can change the playback speed!
(27:34) - You can change everything!
(28:53) - Sponsor: .Tech Domains
(30:32) - What's the possibility?
(35:39) - There's no audio!
(44:24) - Embedding asciinema
(49:00) - Let's install this!
(52:02) - Why is agg not built in?
(56:14) - Sponsor: Neo4j
(57:11) - Installing on Ubuntu
(1:01:03) - Always records to disk
(1:02:26) - There's a lot of possibility
(1:05:02) - Jerod's feature request
(1:07:49) - It is October (Hacktoberfest)
(1:08:43) - What do you want from this?
(1:10:11) - Twitch for Terminal
(1:14:35) - Let's make this a reality
(1:16:51) - Check out Typesense.org
(1:18:56) - Email marcin@asciinema.org
(1:19:58) - Wrapping up
(1:20:56) - Up next (and stuff)