Who we are and what we do
We are the FusionWorks team and we are in search of funds to support us in continuing the development of BashWorks, an online service that will both help users understand the command-line usage of various programs and aid developers in designing simple and easy-to-use guides for their products.
Having previously worked on building integrated solutions for Big Data analysis, we would like to help common tools reach a larger audience by auto-generating the command needed to run them in a terminal.
How does it work? It’s simple - you access a friendly interface that helps you select the needed options and prefil the available fields, then, at one click of a button, we generate the command that you would paste to the terminal. If you develop a tool, don’t bother documenting its various options and arguments - just describe a simple interface using our tool editor and let your users figure it out themselves.
Does
blastn -task blastn -db $BLASTDB -i $BLASTQUERY_FILE -evalue 1e1 -gapopen -1 -gapextend -1 -xdrop_ungap 20.0 -xdrop_gap 30 -xdrop_gap_final 50 -window_size 0 -word_size 11 -searchsp 0 -num_descriptions 100 -num_alignments 100 -penalty -3 -reward 1 -culling_limit 0 -out $BLAST_OUTPUT -outfmt 5 -dust yes
look confusing?
Of course it does! And it should, because, honestly, no sane person should spend time on learning letters in order to understand that without pulling their hair.
Or maybe you feel like you could relate to this situation:
that could have turned out entirely different had Randal Munroe’s characters bookmarked BashWorks earlier.
You might have heard of Gooey and Wooey, so did we, this is why BashWorks is easier to use and as an online service. The code above could be easily obtain through our Blastn UI
Right now, BashWorks has just the basic functionality. With your help we will add new working tools, allow them to be embedded as widgets, improve the existing features and add new features.
What we need
We need money, that’s why we’re here. With $20,000, we will be able to:
- Create more content: cover most popular and confusing command-line tools, as well as those requested by our users
- Extend functionality - create a widged that could be embeded to other pages
- Build a lightweight and easy-to-use tool editor, that will do most of the tool creation work itself
Risks & Challenges
Whether we reach the target sum or not, any contribution will be invested in project development. BashWorks is already alive and we’re working on it, so you take no risks in investing in a project that would never get to see daylight.
Other Ways You Can Help
We are open to any ideas and suggestions - if you think there is something else we can do, tell us and we might even take that into consideration, if we feel kind enough on that given day. Write to us on info@fusionworks.md.