Hey there, this is Adithya.

A list of updates:

• We’ve added one more member, Nithilan Rameshkumar, to our club.
• The ATLAS WhatsApp community has grown to 300 members at the time of writing.

We delivered Terminal Velocity, our workshop on getting comfortable with the terminal. This is a big moment for us as it’s our first in-person technical event.

Some anecdotal background: this workshop has been in the works for roughly a year at this point. Long before ATLAS was an official club within Amrita, Nikhil and I had this vision of a series of sessions focused on dev tools and teaching skills on the periphery of modern development, modelled after MIT’s Missing Semester program. Terminal Velocity is the culmination of all the work we did pursuing that.

The main challenge was that this workshop had a big danger of just becoming us ratting off a bunch of commands for 3 hours straight. We needed to structure this workshop in a way that ensured that we had some form of engagement from the audience and there were things to do even after the session got over.

We did this in two ways:

1. We split the workshop into 3 parts with breaks in between, each part focusing on a specific aspect of the terminal lifestyle.
2. We made handouts for each part that covered all the commands within the session and a lot of bonus information for people to revisit. This way people could learn at their own pace.

Part 0 was focused on the fundamentals. We spent an hour or so getting people used to the terminal, and the commands that most devs need some intuition of. We wrapped this part up with two quests.

Try them out at:

• http://terminal.atlasdev.club/quest0.tar.gz
• http://terminal.atlasdev.club/quest1.tar.gz

Part 1 was focused on scaling everyone’s bash chops by introducing scripting and aliass and modern updates to the tools covered in Part 0. We showed off fzf, ripgrep and zoxide and namedropped a bunch of tools that improved our dev workflows. The main point of this part was to start introducing the real beauty of learning these tools and how one can build very complex workflows to suit their needs from these simple tools.

Part 2 covered data wrangling in the terminal. There are many benefits to just playing with some data within your terminal. We covered tools like duckdb, nushell and jq. With the end of Part 2, we wrapped it up with a quest that we are quite proud of.

Try Quest 2 out here:

• http://terminal.atlasdev.club/quest2

You can download the combined handout for all three parts here.

This workshop was designed to be everything that we wanted out of a workshop. It was planned out to be challenging yet accessible. We wanted to ensure that no matter your skill level, you could take something away from the session.

This event would have been nothing without its audience. We are grateful to all those who showed up and engaged with the material. Thank you for being an active audience who were curious and willing to learn and grow with us.

We hope that you, dear reader, will help support us in our endeavour to build a community of programmers who treat the craft with the seriousness that it deserves.