6 June 2024

A coffee shop for your terminal

By Bashbunni

The terminal got a whole ’lotta love recently when a handful of developers, with a combined following of over 1 million, dropped a new coffee line available for purchase exclusively from the terminal using the Charm stack. That’s right, they built an e-commerce app over SSH to allow developers to refill their coffee IVs right from the comfort of the command line. Talk about a modern day luxury.

ThePrimeagen and TJ DeVries building with Charm on a livestream to thousands of viewers, no pressure
ThePrimeagen and TJ DeVries building with Charm on a live stream to thousands of viewers, no pressure

The project itself is terminal.shop, which leverages Charm tooling at every level to not only sell coffee, but to absolutely demolish their inventory. The coffee company managed to sell out within days of becoming available.

A terminal coffee shop with no coffee, restocking soon!
A terminal coffee shop with no coffee, restocking soon!

The product first launched at one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, React Miami, which brought a lot of web developers over to the command line. Their reach has been impactful, boasting about 5 million impressions on Twitter surrounding terminal.shop and Charm as a result.

A tweet about the team taking over React Miami
A tweet about the team taking over React Miami

Behind the scenes, the team worked to build a TUI for their users with Bubble Tea while Lip Gloss swooped in to provide some lovely styles that came to resemble exactly what they had planned in their Figma designs. Wish allowed them to ship this app to users through a secure connection without the hassle of managing SSL certificates.

Adamdotdev falling in love with Charm
Adamdotdev falling in love with Charm

It was a pleasure (and a curse) to see them build the whole thing live on stream. Thousands of developers were tuned in to watch Prime and TJ put together this command line app, no pressure or anything. The stream was spent hacking away with charm libraries guiding them towards a beautiful end result.

First day of them building in public with Charm, crushing it!
First day of them building in public with Charm, crushing it!
Second day of them building in public with Charm, highly caffeinated.
Second day of them building in public with Charm, highly caffeinated.

We spoke to the team after and found that the toughest part of working with the Charm tools was becoming familiar with the functional design of Bubble Tea. Given the scale of this project, we were pleasantly surprised to hear that was their biggest obstacle. They seem to be happy continuing to hack away on more command line projects. We’ve converted even the web developers to write some Go, just don’t ask about their backend… 💀

Thank you to the incredible terminal.shop team. Please continue to keep inspiring us all!

Adam working through the learning curve
Adam working through the learning curve

Try it for yourself:

Whatcha think?

Have some feedback on this post? We’d love to hear. Let us know in Discord or via email at vt100@charm.sh.

EOF

Read this post in your terminal with Glow:

glow -p https://charm.sh/blog/terminaldotshop.md Copied!

By Bashbunni

6 June 2024

Bashbunni is a coder and developer advocate at Charm. She supports the community by hacking on cool stuff in public and creating educational content.

Let’s chat!

Have a question about a command line thing you’re building? Got an idea for a new feature? Just wanna hang out? You’re always welcome in the Charm Discord.