mikeperham.com
Sidekiq in the terminal
My favorite tech movement in 2025 wasn’t anything artifical, but rather the resurgence in interest around building terminal interfaces with two new frameworks, Charm and Ratatui, which make developing pure text user interfaces easier than ever before using Go or Rust. They provide a huge set of components and examples showing you how to build various types of functionality. Mainframe applications ruled the 70s and 80s, providing terminal interfaces for business operations. You might still see a ticket agent using a terminal to check you in at the airport. That’s an interface to a mainframe application, allowing the agent to lookup your ticket and assign you a seat quickly, with just a few keystrokes. To this day I remember my mom, a pharmacist, complaining about the new DOS -> Windows upgrade that the IT department rolled out to stores. Navigating their retail point of sale terminal application was much faster with a keyboard, the Windows version required a stream of precise mouse clicks and couldn’t rely on typing by muscle memory. Today interactive terminal interfaces are rare but I think Charm and Ratatui make this option much easier to provide.
