OpenAI Eng & Dev Tools Founder: How Software Engineering Is Changing | Charlie Marsh

Charlie Marsh is the founder of Astral, the Python devtool startup that was acquired by OpenAI. I inteviewed him about how software engineering is changing and learnings from starting his own company as an engineer.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/

• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/Iw65FD4MGgs

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835

• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/openai-eng-and-dev-tools-founder

Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:40) Origin story

(06:04) The front page of Hacker News

(14:35) Why he chose Rust

(20:10) Full codebase migration from Zig to Rust

(28:40) LLM generated code and open source

(35:34) Performance optimizations

(44:54) Optimization with AI and combating slop

(01:02:08) Learnings as an eng starting a company

(01:17:55) Top technical talk recommendation

(01:18:56) Advice for his younger self

(01:22:00) Outro

Where to find Charlie:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshcharles/

• GitHub: https://github.com/charliermarsh

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/charliermarsh

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman

• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Python tooling could be much, much faster: https://notes.crmarsh.com/python-tooling-could-be-much-much-faster

• The coolest PR he's ever seen: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/789

• Andrew Kelley’s data-oriented design talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IroPQ150F6c

• Ruff: https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff

• uv: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

• ty: https://github.com/astral-sh/ty

• Salsa: https://github.com/salsa-rs/salsa