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:
There’s also a 🍊 Garden Diary to check out. It’s sometimes updated as the seasons change.
Latest Posts
📅 Posted 2019-01-23
(7 minute read)
The tl;dr
Using AWS Polly to read my articles and generate audio “podcasts” results in an average listening experience. It works and it’s easy, but I wouldn’t want to use it as my primary way to generate articles. Want to hear why? Read on…
(Those wishing to sample the results without reading the gory details can scroll to the end)
The concept of Generating Podcasts using Amazon Polly
Rather than having to painstakingly record and edit all of my articles with a proper mic, what if I use something like Amazon’s Polly on AWS to do the heavy lifting for me?
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📅 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!
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📅 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. Sneaking through the gaps of governance, small things get done with agencies to tactically deliver some work. Both of these approaches can be unsustainable, as both large projects and small initiatives can leave behind technology solutions that people don’t tend to know much about and who aren’t formally allocated to maintain.
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📅 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. Passwords were stored as unsalted MD5’d in the MySQL database (oh the horror!).
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📅 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:
And if you’re after the scc source code or builds, swing over here:
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