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

Akio Morita and Leadership Culture

📅 Posted 2021-10-18 (19 minute read)

Lately I’ve been reading Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony which is the autobiography of Akio Morita, co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. It was originally written in Japanese of course, but I’m reading the English version 😊. What attracted me to this book was Morita’s famous quote about the Sony Walkman: “Nobody openly laughed at me… Everybody gave me a hard time. It seemed as though nobody liked the idea… I do not believe that any amount of market research could have told us that the Sony Walkman would be successul.

Building a custom NAS in 2021

📅 Posted 2021-10-15 (13 minute read)

Lately I’ve been looking into NAS (Network Attached Storage) for home so that I can access my files from any computer at home. I guess moving everything to “the cloud” would be an option but could get costly depending on how much data I want to shift and with the crippled Australian internet with really poor upload speeds (my top tier ‘best available’ connection caps out at 40mbps upload), maybe having a few files on a local store would be more practical.

Can you post-moderate architechure?

📅 Posted 2021-09-11 (10 minute read)

This is a bit of a thought experiment. Recently I wondered about how much rigour and big G ‘governance’ is helpful in architecture. Specifcally, the digital architecture kind I’m involved with in a daily basis. I want to see the role of governance accelerating teams to make great architectural decisions, not to hinder them. In some ways, this is similar to prescriptive procurement processes passed down from generation to generation: if they’re preventing teams from making great decisions, maybe the process isn’t so good after all?

50 shades of asphalt

📅 Posted 2021-08-28 (3 minute read)

Next time you’re on the road, look around you. Experience the sea of cars all painted with greys, silvers, charcoals, gunmetals, blacks and whites. But mostly you’ll probably just see that super common “tar” colour. Why are cars so darn boring when it comes to colours these days? We have the technology to use such a huge range of colour and yet every car on the road is somehow almost the same colour as the road itself!

So I'm a 'Creator Innovator', what does that mean when working with ideas?

📅 Posted 2021-08-25 (8 minute read)

So I haven’t posted about leadership training for a while now, so it’s probably a good time to get back into sharing my thoughts and experiences. For context, the leadership team in my job meets as a group, approximately every month or so, for half a day, to improve how we work together. Today, I’d like to drill into the topic of “ideas” as they relate to some personality profiling we also did.

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