Do you like to shell-script? Does the arcane and confusing syntax of Bash make you feel like a wizard? It does for me.

Exercism is a site where people work on coding exercises, submit solutions, and get mentored by people who are familiar with the idioms of that language. You help the students improve their code and their confidence as they submit iterations and try to keep the automated tests passing. (Yes, even Bash has TDD!)

And we need your help.

We have thousands of students trying to get mentored, submitting solutions, and we have 10 registered Bash mentors. I’m not even sure if all the registered mentors are active on the Bash track. Its averaging about a week to respond to a Bash student. Which is lame! And it makes me feel bad.

So, if you are a Bash guru and want to teach and help people grow, head over to the mentoring sign up page.

I encourage students to make full use of current Bash features like associative arrays, arithmetic, string indexing, and the built-in commands. Bonus points if the student can come up with a solution that is pure Bash (built-ins and language features only), since Exercism is all about learning the idioms of a language. Solutions with awk and sed and grep and tr are fine and good, but nothing beats the rush of PURE BASH! (I’m mostly kidding. In real life, use all the tools that are available to you. But I usually suggest pure Bash to help the student learn what’s available.)

If you’re not comfortable with Bash yet, but want to help, then start as a student, work your way along the track, and once you feel comfortable enough (you don’t even have to finish it!) become a mentor and just mentor the easy exercises!

We need your help!

Sign up at the link above. Message, DM, tweet at, or email me if you have any questions. There’s a whole Slack of mentors to give you advice. Thanks!

P.S. Python, Rust, and Go need mentors too. Probably other languages. Those are the ones off the top of my head.