We should cultivate shell scripting skills in our teams

Improve the reliability of shell scripts

November 17, 2022 by Michaël Le Barbier

The shell scripting language is a difficult, idiosyncratic and occasionally obscure language, but if we use it, there is no reasons to drop the methdologies and wisdoms software developers learnt over half a century of software development. We therefore cannot afford to overlook automated testing for our shell scripts and our shell functions, so that we confidently can use them, update them, and reason about them. Let us examine together how we can start automated testing of shell scripts with just a small effort.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline Self-assessment Sheet

January 17, 2022 by Michaël Le Barbier

This self-assessment sheet is a tool for teams implementing continuous integration and delivery (CID), to assist them in evaluating their practices, preparing a CID feature roadmap and prioritise the tasks on the roadmap.

Improving communication in English

September 23, 2021 by Michaël Le Barbier

As a French native speaker I imported a lot of habits from that language into my practice of English when I started to use it in a professional or private setting. Turning the tables, when non-natively speaking French friends are asking me to correct their French texts, they are usually well written from a grammatical perspective but the way to organise ideas, the expressions used and several other aspects of the language are sometimes very dissonant. The ways of expressions are even so strange that it requires professional skills to “fix them” – for me it’s much easier to start form scratch again. (That said, there is many occasions where it is perfectly acceptable to submit non-natively-sounding texts when they obviously originate from non-native speakers. In these cases, I just correct the grammar.)

We should cultivate shell scripting skills in our teams

March 21, 2021 by Michaël Le Barbier

A consensual stance towards the shell scripting language is that this tool is not suited for the preparation of complex, reliable and evolutive software. Statements according to which shell scripts should be replaced by programs written in a more capable language can frequently be heard but these replacement programs are rarely seen.

We should rethink this consensus because it denies reality. Is the shell scripting language a difficult, idiosyncratic and occasionally obscure language? It certainly is, but there must be many reasons why shell scripts are still in use today. Actually “still in use” is a bit of an understatement: we do not see shell scripting slowly fading away and being replaced by some other more capable tool. Instead, what we see is a steady stream of new shell scripts being written today. We do not see shell scripts surviving in some old arcanes and dusty grymoires, instead we see the application realm of shell scripts expanding. A subtle but strong sign of the relevance of shell scripting in today’s IT-industry landscape is the mention of ShellCheck in the trial section of ThoughtWorks tech radar in october 2020.

It is therefore important to any team active in the IT-industry today to cultivate their shell scripting skills and we present here evidences supporting this claim before providing useful learning material in later contributions.