Looking for someone to work with me on a project in shell scripting (bash)

7    06 Aug 2016 02:48 by u/mazurius

I am working on publishing a (relatively small) open-source project that should allow the bash user to use nested arrays in bash, and parse json files into a corresponding data structure of nested arrays.

This is not a commercial project but an open-source publication. I do not intend to make money out of it.

Therefore, I intend to pay a moderate hourly rate; less than for a commercial project, where it would in fact be the final customers who would pay. I am thinking of hiring students or people who see this more as a hobby. So, the programmers will certainly get paid (weekly/bitcoin), but this free and open-source project is not intended as, and cannot compete with a career job.

If you have relatively little experience in programming, but it is obvious that you would be able to learn, this is also a good project. So, it is more for fellow believers who would be further encouraged when they receive payment too. If you are interested in shell scripting, and you have enough free time for an additional and moderately paid hobby, let me know.

7 comments

1 u/curomo 06 Aug 2016 02:58

What you are asking doesn't sound too complex, but why do you want to do it in bash?

As a guy who has built Ajax services in bash, it's much more straightforward to handle a data structures like json with libraries than nested arrays. The amount of time you'll spend reimplementing (and testing!) existing, mature libs is painful.

0 u/mazurius [OP] 06 Aug 2016 04:07

What you are asking doesn't sound too complex, but why do you want to do it in bash?

It is a bit of a long story. It is about notational purity, and favouring process chaining over function chaining, but I can really not explain it in five minutes. I will just give a quick example of where I believe the true power of the shell lies:

$ ls -l 
$ ssh john@myserver ls -l
$ echoExec ssh john@myserver ls -l
$ shutUp echoExec ssh john@myserver ls

The amount of time you'll spend reimplementing (and testing!) existing, mature libs is painful.

Well, the amount of time to reimplement bash in other languages is even more painful. Try to do this in other languages:

while read f ; do
     scp root@myserver:$f otheruser@myserver2:/tmp/$(basename $f)
done < <(ssh root@myserver myprogram arg1 arg2 arg3)

In a distributed microservice architecture (such as Docker) you really do not want to use any of these other languages.

The advantage of favouring process chaining over function chaining is that you can chain processes while they are running on any machine (or in any container), and combine them with processes running on any other machine. That is probably why even Microsoft has become so fond of bash and shell scripting. If you ever read the Docker documentation you will very soon understand that you would impossibly be able to orchestrate a reasonably large number of microservices using any other tool than a shell scripting engine.

0 u/Jefiakra 06 Aug 2016 04:21

I'll bite. Though I think this is a hilariously unnecessary idea, I also think it'd be kinda fun. I don't need/want your money.

0 u/mazurius [OP] 06 Aug 2016 04:30

Yes, but if you do not really believe in it, would you truly be willing to spend time on it? I mean, it always takes will power and determination to finish any programming project, no matter how small. Where will you find that will power? One reason why I am paying, is because it will work with quite a few people, to keep them on the project, and get them to bite the bullet anyway. Otherwise, they may just abandon at the slightest obstacle. So, 80% of the motivation should come from believing that it is a good idea, and 20% from the fact that it gives you some pocket money anyway.

Furthermore, I want to meet people who turn out to be really good programmers, so that I can do new projects with them, or even propose them for the commercial projects that I work on. It is way less dangerous to get to know each other on a free and open source project than to end up losing face with customers. The latter is usually way more expensive than anything you could think of. To a very important extent, I live off my excellent understanding with particular clients, and therefore, I want to carefully get to know people by working with them for a realistic period of time on non-critical things first.

1 u/Jefiakra 06 Aug 2016 04:53

I don't think it's a good idea, but I think it'd be a fun one, which is why I offered to work on it. I make enough at my job (not dev, but it does include a shit-ton of scripting) that money isn't much of a motivator. If your primary goal with this is to recruit people, I'm not interested.

0 u/mazurius [OP] 06 Aug 2016 05:32

Well, since it takes at least a year of working together, in order to know someone well enough, recruiting people for other open-source projects or even commercial ones, is never a short-term goal. It is indeed much more about working with people that you clearly get along with, and who are also interested in the same things, than money. I look at bash in a completely different way, because after dealing with linux process groups, aka "containers", for almost two years, I can see what you can do with bash, that you would be hard-pressed to do with other languages. Microservices, aka "distributed computing", is a different ballgame from other programming situations. So, someone with just experience in single-machine programming may indeed think that bash is a weird tool, until he has to orchestrate an entire swarm of collaborating containers. One reason why clients are willing to pay so much for Docker-type architectures, is because it is so incredibly harder to attack a swarm than just a single machine. Container walls are almost as impenetrable as virtual machines, and if an attacker has to penetrate a dozen of them ... not everything in the world is just a Wordpress site ;-) So, my short-term goal is to get the open-source publication out of the door, and my long-term goal is to know enough people that I have worked with, so that it would be easier than now, to find people to work on something.

0 u/JordanTShackelford 07 Aug 2016 13:25

I've done some web programming (javascript, css, html). I only know basic bash commands but I would be willing to learn. I don't expect to get paid