This is the average amount of natural gas burned by my water heater to heat about 1 hot shower's worth of water. Yes, I am now able to monitor resource consumption at home. Watch out!

Debugging problems during software development can be frustrating, even if it's immensely rewarding once you eventually figure it out. This is especially true when reproducing the problem seemingly requires some complex dance through tons of other parts of the project. Frustration is further exacerbated when the language used is one you're still trying to master.

Scenario: Congratulations, you won the lottery! You can barely believe your eyes as you stand there holding the winning ticket! It's amazing - so many feelings rush over you as you realize that some of your dreams are within reach now! You run over, nay, you float over to the lottery office to collect your winnings in pure excitement. You push open the doors to the building, scamper up to the front desk, present your ticket to the clerk, and the exchange goes something like this:

This is a really short, simple thing I use to alert me when a long-running shell command/script, like building (some) containers or compiling the kernel, is done. It effectively allows me to switch context in the meantime and pick up where I left off when the long-running dependency is finished.

I recently needed to compare two binary files (ISO images) in order to debug why one ISO would boot with legacy BIOS and the other wouldn't, even though they were presumably generated by the same tooling (turns out they weren't exactly, but that's not what this post is about.)