Blogs Posts by Nick McHardy

Welcome to my blog, where I cover tech, games and whatever else that’s interesting in the universe like vinyl, fusion jazz and side projects.

This website is inspired by the web of the late 90s - no, not just the style of the site - but also harking back to a time when people would set up websites (probably on Geocities or similar) and write about anything that interested them. Most of the websites looked terrible (my first few sites were no exception) but it was so liberating having your own site. So here’s my modern-day version of that late 90s vibe.

Not sure where to start? Here are some blogs to get you started:

Learning About Leadership Episode 1 (May ‘20)
The Humble Minidisc (Aug ‘18)
Why the Sega Dreamcast is the Best Console of All Time (Aug ‘18)
Common Website Vulnerability Scans Found in Logs (Apr ‘18)
On Being an Engineering Manager (Feb ‘19)

There’s also a 🍊 Garden Diary to check out. It’s sometimes updated as the seasons change.

Latest Posts

The day I found Saowen.com had stolen my content

📅 Posted 2018-12-20 (5 minute read)

Recently, I wrote an article about Analytics as Code, which was my way of attempting to apply “Infrastructure-as-code” to something new. A work colleague alerted me to the fact that when he Googled the term, someone else had already written on the topic! In fact, a few people have. But one site, which ranked first, really stood out. It wasn’t my website, but it was my article! The website in question is Saowen.

Doing Products instead of Projects

📅 Posted 2018-12-09 (10 minute read)

Recently I’ve been involved in managing several teams who are making their move from running as project teams to product teams. Today I am taking stock of what this might involve and looking at how people respond to the change. This is the result of 4 months of solidly running with products. Some Background As with a lot of organisations, spinning up large capitally-funded technology projects is the de facto standard on how things get done.

The Green is (almost) Back

📅 Posted 2018-11-23 (2 minute read)

Over 15 years ago in 2002, I bought the domain nisch.org and commenced developing a PHP-based blog with photos and widgety things. Looking back, it was during Uni times and we had a lot of birthday parties and general social activity (not a lot of studying was going on), which was published on my website. Features were added over time including a photo gallery, comments, “yell” box, user accounts and the like.

Counting lines of code in Koi CMS

📅 Posted 2018-10-22 (4 minute read)

My friend @boyter has written a lot about counting lines of code, so I thought I’d have a stab at running his fantastically fast source code counter “Sloc, Cloc and Code” scc over the Koi CMS codebase to see what it thinks. Firstly, if you haven’t thought about counting lines of code or want to know more, Ben has written a lot about this, so check out these links: https://boyter.org/posts/sloc-cloc-code/ https://boyter.

Analytics as Code

📅 Posted 2018-10-04 (19 minute read)

This is a partially-baked idea, so be warned. But I really wanted to get this out there in writing, mainly to see how the idea unfolds. Since thinking about this quite a lot, I’ve only seen a couple of other examples of it in the wild and I’d love to take it beyond being theoretical. You may have heard of Infrastructure as Code, described as: Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

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