miniblog.

Bril is a cute intermediate language for teaching (think simplified LLVM IR): https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/bril.html The idea of providing a standard JSON format to help students write basic passes is really elegant.

GIMP is huge tool that I certainly haven't mastered, but it's so useful to have around. I used it this week to convert images from obscure formats to common ones. It's a great swiss army knife and runs everywhere.

It's really satisfying to use a profiler for the first time on a project. I always find a big performance win with only a small code change. It's never the code that I expected to be slow, however!