Announcing New Unix Shell Maintainer

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After an application and selection process, Ashwin Srinath has been selected as a new co-maintainer of the Unix Shell lesson, joining Gabriel Devenyi and replacing outgoing maintainer Christina Koch.

Introducing Ashwin

Ashwin is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University, and soon-to-be member of Clemson’s Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration (CITI) research computing group. His research areas include computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing. He spends most days programming and making mistakes, and some days teaching others how not to make them. Ashwin has formerly served as co-maintainer for the Software Carpentry MATLAB materials.

I decided to volunteer to be maintainer of the shell lesson primarily because I feel my time is well spent contributing to the SWC organization and community - I’m indebted to them for making me a better programmer and a better person. I’m also excited to work with other maintainers and contributors who I’ve learned a lot from - and will continue to do so.

Christina Thanks…

This post is about introducing Ashwin as a new maintainer, but I’d like to also thank everyone else who has contributed to the shell lesson over the past 1-2 years, either by submitting pull requests in response to issues, commenting on complex changes, or otherwise weighing in on the direction of the lesson. There’s a lot to keep track of in the Software Carpentry lessons, and that responsibility is lighter when shared among an active community. I appreciated everyone’s contributions - even a simple comment of “yes, I agree” or “no, I don’t agree” - more than you know!

I’m looking forward to seeing where the lesson goes in the future with Ashwin and Gabriel at the helm. I’ve not been an active maintainer in the past few weeks, so for those of you with recent pull requests/issues to the shell lesson, sorry for the lack of movement (and thanks to those who have stepped up and commented)! We’ll hopefully clear all that through soon, and continue to improve the material that’s already there.