By Staff Writers

Sitting back in his chair with an air of accomplishment and Godlike irreverence for the mere mortals around him, local man Jonathan Goodspeed was very satisfied with the shell script he just wrote, reports say, despite the script being just absolutely awful.

Friends of Mr. Goodspeed say that as soon as he discovered shell scripting, he “applied it to all aspects of his computing life” and that although many of them worked, the latest script is “just a howler”.

“Oh, Jonny, yeah some of his code has made the lads and I have a good chuckle,” said Andy, one of Mr. Goodspeed’s closest friends. “And the latest one, wowee. We’re talking a spaghetti-like monster that looks like programmatic hellspawn. That’s before we even mention the tens of lines where he invokes ‘cat’, only to pipe it to ‘grep’ instead of just using grep itself. And that’s just one example. He seems pretty chuffed with himself though.”

According to Jonathan Goodspeed himself, the script acts as an all-in-one personal schedule and tasks system, scraping results from local todo.txt files on his system as well as pulling in and manually parsing results from the HTML output of his Google Tasks account. “Guys, let me tell you, it works great,” he said. “It’s all simple, text manipulation baby. Standard tools, no bloated otherworldly languages or whatever new thing the hipsters are learning.”

Mr. Goodspeed added that although some are making fun of the code quality, the fact is “the code works” and that he’ll be “seriously reconsidering his friendship with Andy”, after his friend’s latest remarks.

In the latest reports, Mr. Goodspeed is apparently seeking new employment after a bug in his script caused all his notes and work-related deadline dates, including the online versions, to be completely erased. “I think it’s time I script my own backup system,” he said.