DOP 303: How To Develop a CLI in 2025

Episode 303

Show Notes

#303: In today’s digital realm, command-line interfaces (CLI) are lifelines for developers, embodying the efficiency and power required to manage complex tasks.

The goal in designing a CLI is not to overwhelm users with command intricacies but to allow them to navigate operations seamlessly and intuitively.

In this episode, we speak with Wesley Beary, a founding engineer at Anchor, about their journey of developing a robust CLI for their product.

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Guests

Wesley Beary

Wesley Beary

Wesley is a tech wizard who has been reshaping the developer experience for over 15 years, turning complex API and open source challenges into solutions loved by developers worldwide.

He is currently shaking up the tech world as a Founding Engineer at Anchor, a dev-friendly platform that provides private CAs for internal TLS encryption. It is making HTTPS certificates easy to get on servers, allowing developers to focus on building rather than managing security. Here’s a blog Wesley wrote about how Anchor developed a CLI and the tools that helped.

Wesley’s many career highlights include his maintenance of Ruby’s excon gem (over 485 million downloads) and suite of fog gems for cloud services. He also led the design of the Heroku public API and played a key role in publishing the pioneering HTTP API Design Guide. Wesley’s insights have guided countless developers in building better APIs.

Wesley is more than an open source expert; he’s a community builder, having organized dev meetups and delivered keynote addresses at conferences for Upstream, ArrrrCamp, and Ruby.

Hosts

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a member of the Google Developer Experts and Docker Captains groups, and published author.

His big passions are DevOps, Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment (CI/CD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD).

He often speaks at community gatherings and conferences.

He has published DevOps Paradox and Test-Driven Java Development.

His random thoughts and tutorials can be found in his blog The DevOps Toolkit.