Chris Lamb is a Debian developer writing on command line hacks, Python, Django, and Unix tools.
HN commenters link his trick for getting a progress bar from cp using strace, calling it clever, and his post on the block stacking problem.
Even better solutions which are interesting to visualize were proved optimal in 2007.
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/optimal-solution-for-the-block-stacking-problem-found
This one is also pretty clever (based on catching the write() syscall with strace) :
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/can-you-get-cp-to-give-a-progress-bar-like-wget
strace is definitely a fun toy.
Here's my favourite hack: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/can-you-get-cp-to-give-a-progress-bar-like-wget