Luke Oliff · Blog
Writing.
Original posts, published first on this site. Imported posts live in the archive.
SearchAI (50)API Design (13)APIs (23)Career (6)Community (1)Developer Experience (52)Developer Relations (2)Engineering (124)Fun (1)Git (12)Industry (29)JavaScript (6)Latency (2)Models (2)News (17)Open Source (19)Opinion (35)Pricing (1)Security (10)Speech-to-Text (9)Streaming (4)Text-to-Speech (29)TIL (110)Voice Agents (7)Voice AI (74)
260 posts
2026
TIL: Running TypeScript Directly With tsxOriginaltsx executes TypeScript files with zero config using esbuild under the hood. Faster than ts-node and handles ESM and CJS automatically.TIL
TIL: Chaining Shell Commands With && vs ; vs ||OriginalChaining shell commands with && runs the next only on success, ; runs it regardless, and || runs it only on failure. Pick wrong and CI hides a broken build.TIL
2025
TIL: Finding Processes on a Port With lsof -iOriginallsof -i :PORT shows which process is holding a port. End the 'what is already running on 3000' guessing game for good.TIL
TIL: Reading Gzip Files Without Decompressing With zcatOriginalzcat streams a gzip file straight to stdout without writing a temp copy. Read compressed logs, CSVs, or JSON directly into your pipeline.TIL
TIL: Comparing Directory Trees With diff -rOriginaldiff -r compares two directories recursively, showing every file that differs. Verify that a build output matches between two branches.TIL
TIL: Generating Trusted Local HTTPS Certs With mkcertOriginalmkcert creates locally-trusted TLS certificates in one command. Your browser trusts them instantly — no more self-signed cert warnings.TIL
TIL: Running TypeScript Directly With ts-nodeOriginalts-node compiles and executes TypeScript in memory, so quick scripts and SDK examples run with no build step and no tsc --watch loop to babysit.TIL
TIL: Finding Disk Usage Per Directory With du -shOriginaldu -sh reports disk usage per directory in human-readable form, so you can find what is filling a drive without clicking through a GUI.TIL
TIL: Deduplicating Lines With sort -uOriginalsort -u sorts and deduplicates lines in a single pass. Clean up word lists, logs, and API response extracts without writing a throwaway script.TIL
TIL: Formatting Terminal Output Into Tables With columnOriginalcolumn -t aligns whitespace-separated data into clean columns. Pipe any command output through it for instantly readable tables.TIL