Tricking our prehistoric brains to spot a bug a mile away


Have you ever done something just because it was cool but it ended up being actually useful?

When I started coding, The Matrix movies just came out and ever updating green text over black background was all the rage. I didn't have anything interesting to run in my terminal except vim so I ran htop in one terminal while coding in the other.

 

I had a eureka moment while working on a multi-threaded application and all of a sudden the htop CPU bars were all flashing green and red. Something felt wrong, so I checked my recent changes and found a slow fork bomb hiding in plain sight. That's when it hit me, the same brain that was trained for millions of years to spot a snake approaching from the corner is now able to spot a bug a mile away!

All I needed to do is feed those signals in the side of my screen so my brain will do the visual anomaly detection in the background while I focus on the actual task.

Fast forward 20 years to 2025 and I'm using the same method to this day but I have way more monitors in my disposal. 

Need to run a "docker compose" setup? 

  • htop
  • docker compose logs --follow
  • watch -d docker compose ps

Tinkering with kuda? Run "nvidia-smi -l 1". 

There's a set of monitors suited for every scenario!

What's the moral of the story? Just do what you think is cool - it might actually be useful and even if it doesn't, you'll have some fun in the process. 

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