Nick’s Blog

• Post-Mortem: School Night
  Tuesday, September 10, 2024

  After building Dub and Knok together, School Night was the most extensive app my then co-founder and I worked on together. The product idea came straight from our advisor, NYC-based entrepreneur and sports expert John Brennan. He had most of the core idea written down in a document, and we followed it to a tee. It was the time of ClubHouse’s over-subscribed TestFlight launch with over 10,000 active users. All of Silicon Valley was wasting the first three months of the pandemic away on this app, and it seemed that for a brief moment, serendipity was back on the menu. You ran into people in ClubHouse rooms you hadn’t spoken to in decades, and it became a highly active third-place online. The community was pre-filtered for an interest in emerging tech and new apps. Many founders, builders, an

• Post-Mortem: Knok
  Monday, September 9, 2024

  The second product I worked on in 2019 was Knok. Knok grew out of believing that how we use our phones to talk to the most important people in our lives is deeply flawed. It all started when my co-founder and I walked through Midtown to get something to eat. He had a product idea: “We should build a social media network for your own family,” he said. What a stupid idea, I thought. One week later, this product idea made some ex-Facebook engineers very rich. They built Cocoon and raised quite a bit of VC money for it. It was exactly what my friend had proposed: a private social media network just for you and your closest people. With this newfound belief in our ability to predict the future and generate ideas that reflect the spirit of the times, we built Knok, a text-based messenger that fi

• Post-Mortem: Dub
  Sunday, September 8, 2024

  It is the job of the entrepreneur to build many unsuccessful products. That is until one of them turns out to capture an audience and work out. Work out in a way where it’s both a financially and spiritually sound decision to keep working on one thing and to give this thing your all. Until then, however, it’s all about iterating. It’s all about throwing things at the wall until something sticks. I’m sure there are tons of people out there who will say otherwise. People who work on the same products for years and years until they’ve perfected them and turned them into something that works well enough. I’m not that kind of entrepreneur. I am very attached to all of my ideas—until I’m not, And until I move on and find the next thing to obsess over. This post is the beginning of a series of po

• 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 that the 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 lessons. I want to take a moment to discuss three things: the developments that I expect will lead to the 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 at least three domains were popping up on Google. All being called something along the lines of new-york-times-strands-archive.to I was not affiliated wit

• 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