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

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! I’m going to try and share as much as I think I can (and as much as I can remember) as well as put down some of the thoughts that I wrote down as I went along. Some of it will be difficult to share - I can’t read all of my handwriting!

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.

Working through COVID-19

📅 Posted 2020-04-22 (4 minute read)

Boy, these sure are interesting times. I’ve been working from home for about 5.5 weeks, as a result of the global COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic.

Lucky that the organisation I work for takes it very seriously. I mean, they kinda have to.

We have a lot of news journalists at work who are dedicated to ensuring the Australian public remains well-informed with accurate information. So it’s difficult for the Managing Director to refute the reports in the media!

How I became a Senior Digital Architect

📅 Posted 2020-04-21 (13 minute read)

A colleague at work asked me the other day:

How did you become a solution architect?

It’s a good question and one which required a bit of thought. So I figured I might as well write my answer here and share it. Of course, the usual disclaimer is relevant here: this is my story, your situation is probably different, this is not the only way, batteries not included, yadda yadda.

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