Garage Sale Find: Sangean ATS 505

Getting Back into Ham Radio (aka UV5R Basics)

Adventures in GitHub (and why I just use Bash)

That’s me on the right. (Credit to @georgeb3dr)

First let me say- I am not a software developer. But, I’ve written several scripts for system administration of Linux servers. You might say they are programs, but if you ask me, they’re just elaborate one-liners that outgrew the the command line! But they have indeed grown, and one of them is 250 lines at this point. Version control was becoming a thing that I needed to pay attention to, because I’d have versions here and there that I had worked on a little bit on different servers that I own or manage for my customers.

I do follow the software crowd a little bit, because I think their infighting and trendmongering is interesting and every so often I actually learn something. There’s nothing like a PHP vs JavaScript flame war (they’re arguing over which is worse. When somebody brings up Ruby they just tell them to shut up. It’s a blast.) There’s this thing where they publish code called GitHub, and someone else can even contribute code. It’s pretty cool, and it seems like a solution. Recently I actually wanted to contribute code to someones project, and I have to *gasp* email it to them. That’s SO 2003!

So I pulled the trigger and got myself a GitHub account and added a few scripts to it. I don’t know if anyone will ever like them or use them, but they are there for the whole world to laugh at. “Wow, he uses Bash instead of Python! What a loser! What will he do next? QBasic?!”

Get off my lawn, hipsters! If I run into something that can’t be done in bash, I’ll expand my horizons. So far my needs have been fairly basic and everything I want can be done in bash. It doesn’t do everything of course, but I can parse and create CSV files with ease, and even generate HTML when needed. I’ve dabbled in PHP for doing things that only PHP can do (you’ll never see me post a URL ending in .sh!) and find it sufficiently supported that I can figure out whatever I need to on StackOverflow, so that’s always nice. Same goes with bash really.

So anyway, there it is. I’m on GitHub now, and I unapologetically use bash for as much as I can. Take that, hipsters!

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