E120: Building Better Python Tooling

Open Source Startup Podcast

Charlie Marsh is Founder & CEO of Astral, builders of next-gen python tooling. Their first project, ruff, is an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter written in Rust and has 22K GitHub Stars.

In this episode, we dig into why they started with a linter, getting to 8.5M monthly downloads, the impact of building with Rust, how they developed deep 1:1 relationships with their community, growth unlocks (when companies like Hugging Face started using them, for example), how Charlie put his authentic voice into their content, what parts of Python tooling they'll take on next (package manager, testing, documentation) & more!