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< title > Nicholas Orlowsky< / title >
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< h1 > Spring Break 2023< / h1 >
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< p > It' s Spring Break, and that means I finally have time to spend all day working on side projects without having to worry about school.< / p >
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< p > I figured I should write out the side projects I plan to work on over the break< / p >
< h2 id = "ringgold" > RingGold< / h2 >
< p > < code > Rust, Swift, PostgreSQL< / code > < / p >
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< p > Last week, me and my cousin wanted to try out Apple' s fitness competition feature that works with Apple Watch. It works
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by giving you 1 point for every percent you complete of your move, exercise, and stand goals with a point cap of 600
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per day. The issue with it was that it didn' t work at all, not syncing on time if at all. I want to build a clone of it
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with some additional features such as:< / p >
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< li > < p > < strong > Notifications:< / strong > I didn' t like how it was possible to workout and gain a bunch of points and just completely blindside your opponent. Hopefully this would encourage users to workout even more.< / p >
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< li > < p > < strong > Widget/Watch Complication:< / strong > Similar to the above, adding a homescreen widget or a watch complication would make it easier to keep up with your competitor' s progress. < / p >
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< li > < p > < strong > Custom Competitions:< / strong > I think it' d be nice to have competitions with custom rules and lengths so that you' re not stuck with only one setting. Settings could include custom duration and custom caps on points.< / p >
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< p > I' m building the web API for it in Rust and the mobile app in Swift. I chose these languages to gain more exposure to them, also
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Swift was a good choice since the app is going to be platform specific to iOS due to its need to integrate with Apple Watch.
< em > (this is named after New Ringgold, PA)< / em > < / p >
< h2 id = "nws-container-deployment-service" > NWS Container Deployment Service< / h2 >
< p > < code > C#, Rancher< / code > < / p >
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< p > I' ve created my own hosting/cloud service called < a href = "https://nws.nickorlow.com" > Nick Web Services< / a > . It currently allows people to deploy
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dockerized applications on my geo-distributed k8s clusters running on Dell Poweredge servers. In order to actually deploy this, I
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had to manually create the Kubernetes manifest files and then ssh into each individual server and apply them. I' ve setup
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Rancher Fleet to automate this process by pulling the manifest from a git repo (this is something called gitops). I also
wrote an API to generate the manifest files and then upload them to a git repo. I have a video demo of this working that
you can watch < a href = "https://youtu.be/WHdXWMFHuqA" > here< / a > .< / p >
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< p > Currently, the service works for deployment but only if you don' t want to use SSL or you use Cloudflare' s flexible SSL
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technology. I wrote a separate blog post < a href = "http://nickorlow.com/blog/ssl-in-nws-cds" > here< / a > about the challenges of doing this and how I plan on implementing it.
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I' d like to complete part of this implementation during the break.< / p >
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< h2 id = "verifiedbot" > VerifiedBot< / h2 >
< p > < code > JavaScript, Rust< / code > < / p >
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< p > This project isn' t a personal project, as a lot of it was built by my friends < a href = "https://arpan.one" > Arpan< / a > and < a href = "https://benaubin.com/" > Ben< / a > .
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A little over a year ago, we wanted to make a Discord bot to verify that people on some Discord servers we ran
went to the University of Texas. Initially, it worked by verifying you had a utexas.edu email address and then verifying
some additional information via LDAP. A few months ago Ben found out that using the SaaS survey software that the university uses
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(qualtrics), we could have users verify themselves by using the university' s SSO system. This works because qualtrics can send
data to a webhook when a survey is complete, and it can also require signing in with the university' s SSO before filling out a survey.
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It required that I write a < a href = "https://github.com/Verified-Bot/aes-gcm-siv-wasm" > wasm wrapper for an encryption library< / a > . I wrote almost all the code for this function last year, but
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due to a bug in qualtrics, it wasn' t working properly. It seems that this bug has been fixed and we can start rolling it out.< / p >
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< h2 id = "personal-website-facelift" > Personal Website Facelift< / h2 >
< p > < code > Typescript, React< / code > < / p >
< p > My personal website (this one) is a little overdue for some design updates. My main focus will be making it more mobile
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friendly. Last year, I made some improvements to make it usable on mobile but it still doesn' t feel quite right. I also
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think that it has some information overload in some areas such as the projects section. I think that to mitigate this I
might just have a small summary of each project and then you can click into each to learn more about it, similar to my
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friend < a href = "https://raulhigareda.com" > Raul' s Website< / a > . I' m also considering a move to tab-based navigation so that I can have
more information in each section. Further down the line, I think I might re-write it using Svelte as I' m seeing it being used more and more
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and would like to get some exposure to it.< / p >
< h2 id = "mahantongo" > Mahantongo< / h2 >
< p > < code > Rust, PostgreSQL< / code > < / p >
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< p > I' m one of the members of the Community Team that runs some UT Computer Science community Discord servers.
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Currently, a Discord bot called Carlbot provides us a star-board, which is a specific channel where messages that 5 or more people
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react to with a star emoji get posted. It' s supposed to be a collection of the funniest and best messages sent on the server.
One of the things our server members have wanted is the addition of more ' *-board' channels where you can create multiple star-board
like channels but with custom emojis. I' m writing it in Rust and I' m just hoping to use this project to get more acquainted with the language.< / p >
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< p style = "margin-bottom: 0px;" > Copyright © Nicholas Orlowsky 2025< / p >
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< p style = "margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;" > Hosting provided by < a href = "https://nws.nickorlow.com" > NWS< / a > < / p >
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