Jan-Piet Mens

Jan-Piet Mens is a veteran open-source contributor whose tooling quietly powers countless DevOps pipelines; his best-known utility, jo, turns shell variables into valid JSON in a single piped command, eliminating the need for fragile quote escaping or heavyweight parsers. Originally written to simplify MQTT message construction for home-automation scripts, jo has since become a staple in CI templates, Docker entry-points, log-shipping filters and cloud-init snippets where Bash must speak REST. The tiny binary accepts flat or nested key–value pairs, arrays, booleans and nulls, emitting compact or pretty-printed output that is immediately consumable by curl, kubectl, aws-cli and every major configuration-management agent. Because jo is written in strict C with zero dependencies, it compiles cleanly on Linux, macOS, *BSD and Windows, and is routinely baked into minimal Alpine containers and embedded firmware images alike. Sysadmins pair it with jq to build dynamic Grafana dashboards; backup scripts use it to craft time-stamped payload objects; and educators embed it in shell-scripting labs to demonstrate serialization without leaving the terminal. All releases are tagged on the author’s GitHub mirror and distributed under the GPL-2.0 license. The software is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are served through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always deliver the latest upstream build, and can be installed individually or in batch alongside other utilities.