I was recently a guest on Scaling DevTools, hosted by the gracious Jack Bridger.
We talked about how Oh My Zsh went from a messy little config I shared with a few coworkers into one of the more widely used open source developer tools in the world. Which still feels a little absurd, especially when I look back at the original blog post where I announced it and remember how little grand strategy was involved.
The original goal was not world domination. There was no developer platform strategy. No roadmap. No monetization funnel wearing a fake mustache.
As I said in the conversation:
I literally wanted, like, eight of my coworkers to have this on their computer so that I could be lazy and not have to remember all these complex Git commands.
That was basically it.
A few of the things we covered:
- why Oh My Zsh started in the first place
- how themes and plugins came out of coworkers wanting to customize things
- why Git felt so strange and useful in the late 2000s
- designing developer tools for beginners instead of optimizing for the loudest experts in the room
- why automatic updates ended up being one of the accidental ingredients that helped the project spread
- what it feels like to “create” something that is probably more accurately described as something I curated
- how AI-assisted pull requests are showing up in open source
- why software consultancies might need to rethink what they actually sell
The fun part of revisiting this story is realizing how many of the “features” were really just small decisions made to keep a few coworkers from stepping on each other’s toes.
Themes happened because someone did not like my color choices. Rude, obviously.
Plugins happened because someone wanted Python and Django shortcuts without dragging along all my Ruby on Rails assumptions.
Automatic updates happened because nobody was going to remember to cd ~/.oh-my-zsh and run a Git pull on a regular basis. Which is fair. That is not a lifestyle anyone should aspire to.
A lot of Oh My Zsh grew out of trying to make the command line feel a little less intimidating for people who were still getting comfortable there. Not the person shaving milliseconds off shell startup time with a jeweler’s loupe. The person who wanted their prompt to show the Git branch, make the terminal feel less hostile, and maybe feel slightly more like a hacker in a movie where nobody ever mistypes.
Anyway… Jack and I got into all of that, along with open source maintenance, developer experience, AI-assisted contributions, software consulting, and the strange career consequences of accidentally starting a project that outlives your original intentions.
You can listen to the episode over on Scaling DevTools, or watch the interview above.
Thanks again to Jack for having me on.
