Faraday is a flexible HTTP client library for Ruby. It supports multiple adapters and is built using a rack-inspired middleware stack. Various middlewares can be enabled to modify or log information during the request/response cycle.

As the README states, “WEBrick is an HTTP server toolkit that can be configured as an HTTPS server, a proxy server, and a virtual-host server”. I recently needed to create a small proxy, with minimal effort, in order to hide some functionality of a proof-of-concept API. WEBrick is quite powerful, and a small proxy does not require more than 20-25 lines or code.

Vagrant is a tool which creates virtual development environments using various virtualization platforms. These platforms are called “providers” in the Vagrant universe. It supports VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V and as of version 1.6 it also offers built-in support for using Docker as a provider.

I recently noticed that xmobar has a plugin to read data from Unix named pipes. Named pipes can be used for inter-process communication (IPC). Two different application can send and read data using named pipes. A named pipe operates much like the normal (unnamed) pipe you use in the shell. The difference is that named pipes must be explicitly created/deleted and they are accessed through the filesystem. You create named pipes using the mknod or mkfifo commands and delete them with rm.

Git cherry-pick is a great tool, it allows you to select individual commits from a branch and merge them into another. However, if the branch that you cherry-picked from is eventually merged to the same branch that the individual commits landed, you end up with duplicate commits.