As I go deeper into programming on the CLI without using VSCode or other IDEs, I came across the issue that some of my tools don’t handle light / dark mode elegantly, and I had to do a bit of hacking.

When I’m making music in the evenings, I like a little creative nudge. So I built a self-hosted system that sends me a daily Oblique Strategy quote on WhatsApp while I play - free to run and using WhatsApp Web directly from my machine. Here’s how it works.

There are times when you need unique branch names or commit messages. This is easy to do directly from the command line.

I needed to generate files of a certain size for performance testing - their contents were irrelevant. The dd utility was perfect for the task.

On macOS, netstat is a BSD-based tool that is still fully supported. It is great for seeing open connections, routing tables, and interface stats. When you want to see which process owns a connection or port, lsof is the tool to use.

When you want to check how your Mac’s disk and CPU are doing, or peek at memory and swap activity, the commands iostat and vm_stat come in super handy. Both are built-in and give you quick snapshots of system performance.