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

New Section: Garden Diary

📅 Posted 2020-06-30 (1 minute read)

I’ve launched a new feature on this site - which is basically a place for me to keep track of changes to our suburban garden. The plan is to have things like: A catalogue of all plants in our garden Micro updates as things change… hopefully for the best (hoping not to share the passinig of plants which is sometimes inevitable) Links off to other sources to learn more about some of the plants we have Just basically an online place to share our garden with people!

Why the purple toasters?

📅 Posted 2020-06-02 (4 minute read)

I was recently asked this very question and going with the “I might as well respond in blog form” strategy, here we are. 10 years ago now, I had a couple of “on the side” clients where I looked after their websites and some of their IT needs. I operated as a sole trader and didn’t really have a formal name, apart from my using own name. This didn’t seem ideal.

Learning About Leadership Episode 1

📅 Posted 2020-05-31 (12 minute read)

Recently I’ve been attending training sessions on what makes a great leader and what I (and the rest of my team) can do better to reach leadership nirvana. It’s a really positive exercise and frankly, the best training I’ve done in a long time. We’ve been asked to keep a diary, which I’ve never been really that good at. Well, apart from this blog of course. But that’s a little different!

Adding lazy loading for images in Hugo static site generator

📅 Posted 2020-05-13 (3 minute read)

I recently added lazy loading to images on my blog, just to see if I could get the overall page load time down. I’ve tried to make sure my site is already pretty fast, but I’d like to see what other bit of juice I can squeeze out of the lemon, especially for slower connections. You could do this with a custom shortcode, but that’s not fun because any existing image tag in content won’t be rendered with the appropriate markup.

Google Home + Spotify + Screenshots = Mixtape

📅 Posted 2020-05-01 (3 minute read)

We’ve been running a bit of music at home (especially with all of this “work from home” activity lately) and as a consequence, often ask Spotify to play some music on the smart speaker. Usually it plays what we ask for (or close enough anyway) but I still have trouble asking for “Yello” (instead I get that overplayed “Yellow” song by Coldplay). I can’t help but feel the lack of a keyboard is a limiting factor.

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