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

How I manage a product backlog with my version of Kanban

📅 Posted 2018-08-09 (6 minute read)

I’ve written a bit about the technical side of building a serverless CMS product called Koi CMS, but I thought it might be nice to talk about the other side of things: the side that involves Sharpies and Post-It® Notes. Oh yes, this is going to be a Product blog. Or something like that. I probably haven’t even experienced real Kanban, so this is just a good way to capture my experiences so far.

Serverless Koi CMS 1 Year Review

📅 Posted 2018-08-03 (9 minute read)

So I was thinking the other day, how long have I been working on Koi CMS? A quick check of some early assets reveals I first deployed a test website on 20th July 2017 but the real “Ed” infrastructure went up 26th July 2017, followed by other data storage (aka S3 buckets) on the 27th. Let’s call 26th July 2017 the birth of Koi. In actual truth, I had a go at building Koi way back in 2015 but didn’t get very far.

Adventure Games: What's with all the clowns?

📅 Posted 2018-06-19 (7 minute read)

The thought struck me tonight: there is a bit of a thing having clowns in adventure games. Some people find clowns quite scary and yet they appear in the most innocent of adventure games. So that begs the question, what’s with all of the clowns? To answer this, I had to find, fire up and generally muck around to make a bunch of classics work. ScummVM of course helps a lot in these situations!

Serverless CMS Deployment Using CircleCI

📅 Posted 2018-06-11 (4 minute read)

Recently I’ve blogged a few times about building a serverless CMS using Hugo and AWS tech, but I haven’t talked at all about deploying it yet. I’ve been having a look at CircleCI, especially since the release of 2.0 of the CircleCI platform about a year ago (well, once it came out of beta anyway!). The following was all tested using the “free” version of CircleCI: that is, you can run up to 1 Linux container for a private repo for free.

Kids of today reacting to a classic Twin Famicom and CRT TV

📅 Posted 2018-06-03 (8 minute read)

So I finally got around to taking my Twin Famicom for a drive to my parents’ place. You see, I was on a bit of a mission to try out some 80s gaming action on a genuine CRT TV which my parents still rock. It’s brought into the modern age with the help of a DVB Tuner, keeping those broadcast TV programmes alive for a little bit longer yet. I had actually forgotten a few things about CRTs, having used LCD TVs for so long now.

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