I very frequently use netcat (or openssl s_client for HTTPS servers) to connect directly to a server I am debugging. It could be argued that there is no "need"

I very frequently use netcat (or openssl s_client for HTTPS servers) to connect directly to a server I am debugging. It could be argued that there is no "need" for this, but I find myself doing it quite frequently all the same. That may have something to do with the fact that I am developing a relatively low-level reverse HTTP proxy tool (PageKite), but I also did it quite a bit when working on more traditional webapps. Once you speak the protocol it's nice to be able to just connect and chat with the server directly. :-) Humans are really bad at speaking binary.