Saul Pwanson

Hi there!  My name is Saul, and I've been programming since I was a kid in the '80s.  In 2016 I turned 40 and reflected on my career, and while I had written some really useful tools over the years, that code was all owned by my employers and no one else would ever be able to use them--not even me!  So I decided to rewrite one of those tools &quot;Once And For All&quot; (OAFA), and the result was <a href="https://visidata.org/">VisiData</a>, a terminal-based supertool for tabular data.  After 5 years, VisiData is now a mature open-source project, with thousands of active users, a <a href="https://visidata.org/chat">growing community</a>, a well-maintained <a href="https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues" target="_blank">issue list</a>, and <a href="https://visidata.org/releases">regular releases</a>. I spend a fair amount of time maintaining VisiData, but currently I'm also working on three (related) projects: - Dataverter, a CLI utility and Python library that streams the data 
from any* file format or URL and allows you to transform and save it in 
any* format. - <a href="https://github.com/visidata/vdplus" target="_blank">VisiData Plus</a>, a bundle of VisiData enhancements and alternate interfaces that are out of scope for core VisiData (like the experimental web scraping interface, or Galactic Conquest, an old-school multiplayer space strategy game). - <a href="https://bluebird.sh">Bluebird.sh</a> (with the <a href="https://github.com/devottys">Devottys</a>), an ssh/telnet server with the best terminal software and textpunk games around. I'm deeply committed to open source and open data, but I'm also committed to sustainable personal economics.  So for now, these projects are not Open Source, but they are source-code available and free for non-commercial use.  They will be released as open-source eventually, but in the meantime, subscribing to this Patreon will both support me and give you license to use them in your paid work. And of course if you are a fellow data and/or terminal nerd, I would love to hear from you regardless--please send me a note at patreon@saul.pw and tell me what you've been working on. Share and enjoy!

Free

You love VisiData or another of my projects and want to see more data magic and textpunk powertools.  If you want to request new loaders or features in VisiData Plus, or just get a few stickers, subscribe at this tier. (Send a message with your address after you subscribe, if you want stickers.)

Elite User

You use the free and open-source VisiData in your paid work because it gets the job done with a minimum of effort and saves you a ton of time.  If you want to balance that karmic debt, or if you want to use VisiData Plus features in your paid work, subscribe at this tier.

Professional

If you want to use the Dataverter library and/or VisiData Plus as part of the backend for your small business, subscribe at this tier.  (Corporate sponsorships are available via Github Sponsors: <a href="https://github.com/sponsors/saulpw" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://github.com/sponsors/saulpw</a>).

Saul Pwanson

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