Nick’s Blog
- Why strand.spreen.co is Now Offline Thursday, June 20, 2024
Thank you for navigating to strand.spreen.co I appreciate everyone who got some use out of this archive for the short time it existed. The TL;DR of this post is: NYT sent me a copyright notice that I will comply with. The website is now shut down. Keep on reading for a bit of a backstory, drama, and some learnings. I want to take a moment to talk about three things: The developments that I expect lead to NYT shutting this site down, what you might be able to learn from it, and what’s next. copy cats Only a week after I finished this passion project and made it free for everyone on the internet to use and play, I realized that there were at least three domains popping up on google. All being called something along the lines of new-york-times-strands-archive.to I was not affiliated with any
- Building a Stunning Portfolio Website with AI-Powered Tools Monday, May 6, 2024
As a developer, having a compelling portfolio website is crucial for showcasing your skills and attracting potential clients or employers. In the past, creating a visually appealing and informative portfolio required significant time and effort. However, with the advent of AI-powered tools and innovative platforms, the process has become much more streamlined and accessible. In this article, I’ll share my experience building a stunning portfolio website using a combination of cutting-edge tools. The first step in creating my portfolio was to gather all my projects and decide on a visually appealing layout. That’s where Bento came in. Bento.me is a fantastic platform that allows you to create a grid-based layout for your projects, making it easy to showcase your work in an organized and aes
- Introducing JSON.swift Sunday, April 21, 2024
TL;DR: Link To GitHub A Streamlined JSON Parsing Library for Swift Developers As a Swift developer, you’ve likely encountered the challenges of working with JSON data in your projects. While Swift is a powerful and expressive language, its built-in JSON parsing capabilities leave much to be desired. That’s why I’m excited to introduce JSON.swift, a hobby project that aims to simplify JSON parsing in Swift and make your development experience more enjoyable. JSON.swift is a lightweight library that provides a clean and intuitive way to access parsed JSON values. With JSON.swift, you can say goodbye to the cumbersome and error-prone process of navigating through nested dictionaries and arrays. Instead, you can access JSON values using a simple and expressive syntax. One of the key features o
- @spreen/dynamo-objects: Type-Safe DynamoDB Objects in TypeScript to Write Code Faster and Safer Monday, March 18, 2024
TL;DR: Link To GitHub DynamoDB DynamoDB, an AWS-managed NoSQL database, excels in delivering fast, scalable performance ideal for modern serverless architectures. It supports diverse applications, from mobile to IoT, with its capability to manage high-velocity data workloads efficiently. Its serverless approach allows developers to concentrate on application development, free from infrastructure concerns. With robust access control and AWS integration, DynamoDB stands out as a top choice for building scalable, modern serverless applications. Using string-based commands for DynamoDB poses risks to code quality due to the lack of type safety, increasing the likelihood of typos and logic errors that go undetected until runtime. This approach undermines TypeScript’s benefits, such as compile-t
- Get started with Fargate on AWS: HTTPS Ingress Monday, August 8, 2022
We recently made the switch from GKE to EKS. While both use Kubernetes under the hood, the experience is vastly different. GKE offers more visual interface guidance while Amazon seems to provide more documentation resources like their new video show ‘containers from the couch’. One of the first challenges you’ll come across with either platform is the experience of linking your domain to your k8s cluster. Ideally, you don’t want to deal with any certificates and SSL traffic yourself, and in theory, there’s always a fully hosted solution by your cloud provider. In reality, you might struggle with load balancers on either the network or the application layer, you might have difficulties getting any higher-level protocols like HTTP2 and WebSockets to work, and getting the cloud provider to ac
- Can Computers Think? Wednesday, May 10, 2017
1 Introduction The question of whether a machine - specifically a computer - can think is older than computers themselves. Especially in the mid-20th century, as the possibilities for programming artificial intelligence flourished, many voices emerged who believed they had found the answer to the question. In this essay, I would like to provide a brief historical outline of the discussion and then draw some personal conclusions. Since the scope here is by no means sufficient to provide even a glimpse, the reader is encouraged to pursue a more comprehensive examination of the subject in [7]. 2 The Beginning ”I PROPOSE to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?‘” — [9, p. 433] This is how A.M. Turing begins in 1950. Subsequently, the question is defined by Turing in various ways and the