The Engineers’ Roundtable

When layoffs hit, two engineers found themselves job hunting.

Both had resumes, certifications, and LinkedIn profiles.

But one had something extra: a public track record.

Their GitHub contributions were visible.

Their name was already known in the community. So while others were applying, opportunities and referrals were found.

That's the power of open source.

Join us on The Engineers' Roundtable as we discuss how open source contributions can become a long-term career strategy.

Date: Wednesday 24th June, 2026

🕐5 pm BST

📍 LinkedIn Live  

Register here.

Hey {{first name | there}},

Jubril here. I've successfully regained control of the newsletter after last week's brief leadership intervention 😅

Recently, I asked Claude to convert a few images and discovered a macOS utility that's apparently been sitting on every Mac since 2003. Twenty years later, and I'm only just finding it.

Over the weekend, I was working with a bunch of HEIC images and needed to convert to PNG's and WEBP, respectively, for various reasons. Up until this point, my instinct has always been to reach for the tool devs love to hate, FFmpeg.

Although I have never mastered any of the commands, thanks to the millions of people who always seem to have encountered my use case, I have been able to get by, and with agents, I simply prompt them to use ffmpeg to do things like rotate an image 90°.

When I asked Claude to convert an image to a PNG, I noticed it was doing so using a CLI tool called SIPS. Instinctively, I cancelled the run as I wasn't sure what was going on, and this is how I would discover a macOS utility that has been in existence for over a Decade. Introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) in October of 2003, Scriptable Image Processing System or SIPS, is a command-line utility that ships with every Mac. No install, no dependencies, just there.

SIPS can read and write a range of formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PDF, and, more recently, HEIC. It handles basic transformations like resizing, rotating, and cropping, and lets you inspect or modify image metadata and color profiles. The syntax is straightforward: you pass it a flag, an output format or value, and a file.

Converting a HEIC to PNG looks like this:

And if you want WebP instead:

That's it. You can also batch a whole folder in one line by pointing it at a directory, which is what made it extremely useful for my weekend situation.

I think it is largely because coding agents tend to default to tools most native to your OS. In the case of a Mac, it would prefer a system utility over having a user install something like FFmpeg. SIPS is always present on macOS, so the agent doesn't have to check whether a dependency exists, handle an install step, or worry about version differences. It's the path of least friction, and for common image tasks, it's more than enough.

If you've stumbled across a built-in tool that completely changed how you work, I'd love to hear about it. Reply to this email and tell me what it was. There's a good chance I've never heard of it.

The Engineers’ Roundtable

When layoffs hit, two engineers found themselves job hunting.

Both had resumes, certifications, and LinkedIn profiles.

But one had something extra: a public track record.

Their GitHub contributions were visible.

Their name was already known in the community. So while others were applying, opportunities and referrals were found.

That's the power of open source.

Join us on The Engineers' Roundtable as we discuss how open source contributions can become a long-term career strategy.

Date: Wednesday 24th June, 2026

🕐5 pm BST

📍 LinkedIn Live

Register here.