# This week in Nu #21

- thegedge and andrasio have been hard at work at improving how externals are spawned and handled inside of the pipeline builder ([#1231](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1231), [#1230](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1230), [#1211](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1211), [#1182](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1182))
- jonathandturner has begun commenting the codebase ([#1229](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1229), [#1228](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1228), [#1225](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1225))
- jonathandturner also improved `ls` to be simpler ([#1195](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1195), [#1194](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1194), [#1192](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1192))
- koenaad added support for sending more value types as $it to externals ([#1218](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1218), [#1220](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1220), [#1210](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1210))
- jonathandturner and andrasio improved testing ([#1200](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1200), [#1198](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1198))
- andrasio extended `pick` to allow column paths and not just column names ([#1191](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1191)) and improved `get` errors ([#1185](https://github.com/nushell/nushell/pull/1185))
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