Welcome to nickb.dev, a blog by Nick Babcock! Below are my most recent articles. You can find the history of all my writings in the archive or just find out more about me.
Migrating a 160k Word Jekyll Blog to Hugo
Published on: At 160k words, this is by no means a small blog. When years of annoyances with Jekyll boiled over, I decided to migrate the Jekyll blog over to Hugo. The results were amazing and will hopefully lower the barrier needed for me to continue writing unencumbered.
Backblaze B2 as a Cheaper Alternative to Github's Git LFS
Published on: When cost optimizing, consider using Backblaze B2 over Github’s git LFS. B2 has a much more generous free tier compared to Github’s: 10x more storage (10GB vs 1GB) and 30x more bandwidth (30GB vs 1GB). Even after exceeding the free tier, Github’s git LFS still commands a 12x price premium. Before abandoning git lfs, there are several tips to keep in mind.
My Bet on Rust has been Vindicated
Published on: I chose Rust for a project and I had struggles along the way which made me second guess this decision, but after releasing and fulfilling use cases I hadn’t considered, the decision was vindicated. The wins that Rust brings outweighed any struggles.
Reasons to Migrate away from Gatsby
Published on: Gatsby is a site generation framework. I recently was using it for one of my side projects, sff.life, a site dedicated to small form factor computing (eg: small computers). I decided to migrate away from Gatsby, as it is not a zero cost abstraction for static sites for two reasons: Needless bloat via javascript and JSON bundles Way too many dependencies and releases Before I give a bit more background and expand on these reasons, I still believe that in many situations, Gatsby benefits outweigh the costs.
Opinionated Guide for Web Development with Rust Web Workers
Published on: I have a toy site that parses Rocket League replays using the rust crate boxcars. Parsing replays is done synchronously and shouldn’t block the browser’s UI thread, so parsing is offloaded to a web worker. Getting this side project to a point where it works + is maintainable (minimum configuration) has been an exercise in doggedness as I spent weeks exploring options. I believe I’ve found a happy medium and here’s the recipe:
Parsing Performance Improvement with Tapes and Spatial Locality
Published on: 2020-08-12: This article described a performant method to parse data formats and how to aggregate serde fields with the input buffered. While the serde demonstration is still valid, I opted to create a derive macro that will aggregate fields that isn’t susceptible to edge cases. There’s a format that I need to parse in Rust. It’s analogous to JSON but with a few twists: { "core": "core1", "nums": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], "core": "core2" } The core field appears multiple times and not sequentially The documents can be largish (100MB) The document should be able to be deserialized by serde into something like struct MyDocument { core: Vec<String>, nums: Vec<u8>, } Unfortunately we have to choose one or the other:
Monitoring Remote Sites with Traefik and Prometheus
Published on: I have several sites deployed on VPSs like DigitalOcean that have been dockerized and are reverse proxied by traefik so they don’t have to worry about Let’s Encrypt, https redirection, etc. Until recently I had very little insight into these sites and infrastructure. I couldn’t answer basic questions like: How many requests is each site handling What are the response times for each site Is the box over / underprovisioned For someone who has repeatedly blogged about metrics and observability (here, here, here, here, and here) – this gap was definitely a sore spot for me.
Downsampling Timescale Data with Continuous Aggregations
Published on: Timescale v1.3 was released recently and the major feature is continuous aggregations. The main use case for these aggregations is downsampling data: which has been brought up several times before, so it’s great that these issues have been addressed. Downsampling data allows queries spanning a long time interval to complete in a reasonable time frame. I wrote and maintain OhmGraphite, which I have configured to send hardware sensor data to a Timescale instance every couple seconds.