🎒 Friday Stack Pack: Weekend Tools That Won't Make You Question Your Life Choices

It's Friday! Time to pack my brain with things that are actually useful instead of architecturally questionable.

Here's what's going into my Friday Stack Pack this weekend:

🧪 1. Tool to Try: docker stats --format "table"

Because sometimes you need to know what's actually eating your RAM without opening 47 monitoring dashboards:

docker stats --format "table {{.Container}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}"

Clean, readable container resource usage. Perfect for those "why is my laptop fan screaming?" moments.

🔍 2. Debugging Tool: Jaeger for Local Development

After my microservices trauma story yesterday, I'm exploring proper distributed tracing - but locally first this time:

# docker-compose.yml snippet
jaeger:
  image: jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest
  ports:
    - "16686:16686"
  environment:
    - COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true

Adding tracing to my modular monolith so I can see where time actually goes. No more "it feels slow" guesswork.

📚 3. Article I'm Actually Reading: "Boring Architecture"

Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

After yesterday's confession about microservices overengineering, this feels like therapy. Sometimes PostgreSQL and Redis are the right answer.

🛠️ 4. Code Quality Weekend Project

Building a simple pre-commit hook that checks for:

• Hardcoded environment variables
• Console.log statements in production builds
• TODO comments without GitHub issue links

#!/bin/sh
# .git/hooks/pre-commit
grep -r "process.env\." src/ --include="*.js" | grep -v "NODE_ENV" && echo "Hardcoded env vars found!" && exit 1

Simple, boring, effective.

🧠 5. Architecture Reading

"Building Microservices" by Sam Newman - Chapter 1: "When Not to Use Microservices"

Starting with the warnings this time instead of jumping to the exciting parts. Character growth!

💤 6. What I'm NOT Doing This Weekend

• Refactoring anything that currently works
• Reading about the latest JavaScript framework
• Setting up a new CI/CD pipeline "for fun"
• Questioning any architectural decisions made before Friday 5 PM

🎯 7. Simple Goal

Add one circuit breaker pattern to my current project using a boring, battle-tested library. No custom implementations, no reinventing wheels.

const CircuitBreaker = require('opossum');
const options = { timeout: 3000, errorThresholdPercentage: 50 };
const breaker = new CircuitBreaker(riskyServiceCall, options);

Exciting? No. Will it prevent 3 AM pages? Hopefully.

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What's in your weekend stack pack? Are you exploring something new and shiny, or doubling down on boring, reliable tools? Drop it below - let's share some actually practical weekend projects! 🔧