Hi there, I'm Nicholas!
I’m a developer with a passion for cloud platforms, web development and automation!
I use this blog to write about my interests. They’re usually tech-related, but there’s also the odd music and gaming piece too.
2021-08-14 //
3 min read
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#docker
I’ve been using Plausible Analytics on this website for a few months now and I’m a fan for three key reasons.
Being able to self-host Plausible gives me ownership of the data it collects, but it also makes me responsible for storing this data and backing it up. I manage backups for my instance with several Ansible playbooks, but the same can be done with plain shell commands.
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2021-07-24 //
2 min read
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#ios-shortcuts
If you’ve snooped the MX records for this site recently, you might have noticed that I’ve moved to Fastmail. In addition to email hosting, Fastmail also offers CalDAV accounts for users, so I’m trying it out for my calendar and reminders.
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2021-07-15 //
3 min read
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#nginx
When Nginx is serving this website, it’s usually serving static files from the local machine. One method to accomplish this is with the alias directive, which substitutes the request location for a filepath. I use it to map requests to nicholas.cloud/files/ to a directory for public file-sharing.
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2021-06-14 //
3 min read
For a while now, I’ve used Rush to manage and deploy a number of Cloudflare Workers from a monorepo. It’s been great for me so far, offering incremental builds and support for alternative package managers like PNPM.
One thing Rush leaves to the discretion of maintainers is secrets management. Given tooling and infrastructure can vary drastically between organisations and even individual projects, there’s nothing wrong with this decision. However, it has lead to me implementing my own less-than-desirable setup.
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2021-05-29 //
2 min read
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#gaming
Late last year, I grabbed the original Ace Attorney trilogy on discount after stumbling across a trending fan video. I’ve now played through all six mainline games, and I’m optimistic for a seventh to coincide with the series’ 20th anniversary later this year.
While a new game isn’t confirmed, Capcom will be releasing a localised bundle of The Great Ace Attorney 1 & 2 in a few months. This duo was previously exclusive to Japan, and it’s exiting to see them getting an international release.
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