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.
2020-09-25 //
4 min read
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#hugo
Update:
I’ve brought this disappearing post back from the abyss, enjoy!
That’s right, there’s self-destructing blog posts now
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing expiring blog posts for a while now, ever since discovering the expiryDate variable in Hugo.
Being able to have temporary posts that get cleaned up after a period of time seems like an interesting challenge and a nice convenience. For example, if I want to blog a short-term update that gets taken down once it’s no longer relevant.
While this is easy in a dynamic site (currentDate > expiryDate), it’s something that static sites struggle with. If a site’s content changes over time, a static site must be updated with each change. I know I’m certainly not going to remember to redeploy my site weeks after publishing a temporary post!
With scheduled builds and a little extra configuration though, I’ve managed to automate my troubles away!
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Trying a few final approaches to get one last speed boost
2020-09-12 //
11 min read
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#rust
“Well here we are again, it’s always such a pleasure”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been building a solver for the puzzle game Golf Peaks and improving its performance over the course of a few blog posts. Given I’ve still got a few final ideas I’d like to try, how about one last writeup?
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Now that it's working, make it work fast!
2020-09-05 //
23 min read
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#python
#rust
Previously, I wrote about a solver I’d built for the puzzle game Golf Peaks. In closing, I had a few ideas on how it could be sped up and improved. Over the last few days, I’ve been trying some of these ideas out, and measuring the results!
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A retrospective on a recent weekend project
2020-08-28 //
14 min read
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#applescript
#python
#rust
Recently I played Golf Peaks, a golf-based puzzler from Afterburn Games. I really enjoyed completing all of its levels, so last week I decided to try my hand at building a solver for it.
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Investigations into solutions and workarounds I've seen in the wild
2020-07-27 //
9 min read
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#css
#react
#webdev
A while back, I wrote about the inner workings of a neat CSS trick I spotted in use on a website. The world of software development is rife with these kinds of tricks, so why not look at more of them in another blog post?
I’ve gathered a few interesting fixes here to problems I’ve either encountered myself in web development, or seen others grapple with. So without further ado, let’s jump into it!
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