A developer's Monday morning with Stackyard, in eight steps

Mondays on a developer's Mac start with whatever Friday left behind. A dev server from a terminal you closed, a container still running from a demo, a port taken by something you cannot name, and memory already under pressure before you have opened your editor.

This is the routine we use to clear that up and start the week. It takes about five minutes, and most of it happens from the menu bar.

1. Read the menu bar

Before opening anything, look at Stackyard's menu-bar item. It shows how much memory is in use, and a ⚠︎ beside it means pressure is already high. Click it and the menu lists the heaviest apps with a Quit button each, your local servers with a health dot, and any running projects with Stop. Most Mondays, this is enough to see what Friday left.

2. Quit last week's orphans

At the bottom of that menu is a single button that quits all orphans: the node and python processes still running after the terminal, editor or AI agent that started them closed. If you want to see them first, open Stackyard (⌘O), go to Memory (⌘2) and filter by Orphans. Each one shows which tool left it and the folder it was started in, so you can keep anything you still want.

If you find yourself doing this every Monday, let Guard do it instead: it can quit orphans automatically after 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour, and it leaves databases like Postgres, Redis and nginx alone. The orphans post has the detail.

3. Glance at the Overview

The Overview (⌘1) opens with a memory ring and a sentence: "Plenty of headroom" or "Memory is under pressure". When it is the second, the fix sits right under the headline. In the screenshot above, the buttons offer to quit Docker's virtual machine or the one orphan Stackyard found, which between them were most of the problem.

4. Check what is on your ports

Open Localhost (⌘4). Every listening port is listed with a health dot: green for an HTTP server answering, red for a server error or no answer, blue for something that is not a web server. Ports opened by Docker carry the container's name.

This is where you find the thing that was going to cause "port 3000 already in use" ten minutes from now. Stop it from here, or use Show in Finder to see which process is behind it first. The local servers post covers the rest of this section.

5. Start the projects you need

Go to Projects (⌘5). Once you have added the folders where you keep code, Stackyard lists every dev and start script it found, plus .claude/launch.json configs and run.sh files. Select the API you are working on this week and press Space to start it; its log streams as it runs. If the port it needs is already taken, Stackyard warns you before starting rather than letting it crash.

Projects started from Stackyard stop when you quit Stackyard, which is a useful property on a Friday afternoon.

6. Bring up the containers

If the project needs a database or a queue, open Docker (⌘6). Containers are grouped by Compose project, so Start All brings up the whole stack for one project at once. If Docker is not running, Start Docker launches it. Homebrew services such as Postgres and Redis have an on/off switch each, further down.

7. Set up for the day's calls

If your Monday has a standup and a planning meeting, set up Meeting Mode in Guard once: choose the apps it should quit to give your Mac room for a video call. Turn it on before the call, and when you end Meeting Mode, Stackyard reopens everything it closed. The Guard post covers the other background rules.

8. Once a month: clean what rebuilds

On the first Monday of the month, add one step. Open Clean and look at Dev Caches, then turn on Stale in Projects to see what you have not touched in thirty days or more. A side project from the spring with two gigabytes of node_modules is the usual find. Everything goes to the Trash, and your tools rebuild it on the next install. The dev caches post has the full list.

Making it faster

Once the routine is familiar, you will do most of it from the keyboard. ⌘K opens the command palette from anywhere in Stackyard: type a few letters to quit an app, stop a port, start a project or container, or clean a cache.

You can also script it. open "stackyard://localhost" opens that section from Terminal or another app, and any section name works. Put it in the shell script that starts your week, and Stackyard opens on the screen you check first.

And for a glance without opening anything, Stackyard's two widgets show the memory pressure ring and up to five local servers with their health dots on your desktop or in Notification Center.

Stackyard is a free preview. Ask for a build on its page, and the user guide covers every section and shortcut.