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

Stalking and Personal Marketing

📅 Posted 2018-05-31 (5 minute read)

Or… why I have a website I thought it might be an idea to write a little bit about my recent experience with recruiting. I haven’t personally done a lot of recruiting so far and I can see why people don’t like it very much. It’s certainly an activity that uses a lot of time and often may not get you the outcome you were after. Recently, I’ve spent about 6 months recruiting for a position which has 6 months worth of funding.

Serverless and lambda: what to do when you run out of disk space

📅 Posted 2018-05-16 (5 minute read)

tl;dr Lambda has 512MB of space to play with in /tmp/, which is shared across multiple invocations of the same function, which makes it difficult to manage. Long running functions share the same space and there is no control over when containers are reused. Update 19-Oct-2019: I’m still occasionally running out of space on my lambda instances, which is annoying. Redeploying the function guarantees a fresh disk, but this is hardly convenient.

Common website vulnerability scans found in logs

📅 Posted 2018-04-06 (6 minute read)

The other day I had a look around some website traffic logs and I found a lot of references to the following files. After a bit of Google ‘research’, I thought I’d write something down. I do like to monitor the number of 404 errors over time to keep things clean and going through logs is a great way to do this. Favicon.ico is a classic missing file (which I haven’t got around to doing for this site yet!

Adjusting the solution when S3 doesn't quite fit the bill

📅 Posted 2018-04-04 (4 minute read)

So it turns out using S3 as a data store and pseudo-query engine isn’t all that crash hot. Sure, it “works” with about 200 items but for sites pushing thousands of files of content, you can quickly see it’s not ideal to pull down large chunks of file lists. It’s also pretty poor at some of the more rich functionality like listing some header information or metadata about each file which would require additional S3 calls for each file.

Beneath a Steel Sky Review

📅 Posted 2018-04-03 (4 minute read)

I’ve been writing a lot of serious posts of late, so I thought it was time to break things up a little bit. I’m going to embark on a series of video game related posts, which is one of my other passions. To kick things off, I’m going to dive in to a great little point-and-click talkie adventure game from 1994 called Beneath a Steel Sky. Originally developed by Revolution Software (the people behind the Broken Sword series, which I will cover another day), it brought together Charles Cecil’s game design with the comic art of Dave Gibbons.

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