Nicholas here, hello world!

Hi. My name is Nicholas. I’m a Sr. Software Engineer at Amazon.com. Formerly, I ran a small consulting company called PolyForest, before that, a Sr. Software Engineer at Riot Games.

But where I’ve worked and what I’ve done doesn’t really say who I am. My personality tends to be a bit much. I’m loud, gregarious yet simultaneously shy and nervous around people. I love it when things work smoothly and when they don’t, I’ll be the first person to let you know. I pay attention to things like the weight of the buttons on a car steering wheel feel, or the noise it makes when you shut the door.

Why this blog?

Almost 20 years ago now I had a somewhat popular Flash blog. It was amazing to see people engage with my content, try my experiments, tell me about their experiences using my libraries, and something where I can go back and read what I was into at the time. With the death of Flash, I not only lost part of my identity as a developer, but also the community to which I was ingrained. While my choice of tech has long since matured (I was one of the early adopters of Kotlin and TypeScript), I never fully regained that community I had with Flash. JavaScript user groups felt too large and intimidating, and now with two young children my time to devote to hobbies or community events is limited.

No AI Content

AI created this site, a one shot “make me a blog aesthetically similar to polyforest.com.” But the posts and content will be 100% authentic and original. I will not even use AI to proofread, because I want the flaws and imperfections to be my own. If I make a mistake, feel free to let me know. It may be an exercise to learn how to write again.

Thoughts are my own

The thoughts expressed here are my own. They are not those of my employer. While I will be posting about public Amazon projects such as Vinyl, this is a personal blog.

Thanks

This blog was created using Astro with the Obvious AI app. I have little time for personal projects, so I’m pleased how little effort this took. It was “make this blog look like polyforest.com” and a little bit of configuration to set a CNAME to point to github pages. I made the source code public, so feel free to poke around and comment about the AI-generated code. I had never even heard of Astro before this and all I know is that I have a blag again now after 15 years. :)