Kompas
Technology should serve values, not just velocity. Kompas is my direction for building initiatives that hold digital practices to a higher standard - questioning what's accepted, surfacing what's overlooked.
A compass for good digital production
Draad
Sustained attention for thinkers, writers, and makers. For more delight, surprise and curiosity.
Shell Literacy
Scientia peritus sine lima. Fundamentum programmingi qui omnis programmator scire debet.
Activity
Lab Notes \#1 – Shell? In 2026?
In the past weeks I’ve shared the idea of shell literacy with a few people. One class of reaction surprised me with its strength:
Shell? In 2026?
My initial reaction was an inclination to file it under: “Welp, clearly not for everyone…” Later, I could make sense of them.
For most people, “shell” means nothing at all. The remaining people, who know something about shell, are in the early stages of shell literacy. This is exactly the hypothesis that drives me to work on it. Their reactions are to be expected, but not to be taken as a verdict.
By analogy with other literacies, shell illiteracy has recognisable symptoms:
- avoidance of shell-based tooling due to low confidence or high cognitive cost
- reliance on graphical tools for tasks suited to shell workflows
- inability to read or modify pipelines or scripts
Next up: Tasks suited to shell workflows, which are commonly relied upon by graphical tools?
Talk at Sustainable IT Action NL meetup
Baby steps! I gave a talk during the 23rd April edition of Sustainable IT Action NL meetup. You can find the companying material for the talk at my personal webpage.