80 lines
6.8 KiB
HTML
80 lines
6.8 KiB
HTML
<head>
|
|
<title>Nicholas Orlowsky</title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">
|
|
<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico">
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<nav>
|
|
<a href="/">[ Home ]</a>
|
|
<a href="/blog.html">[ Blog ]</a>
|
|
<a href="/projects.html">[ Projects ]</a>
|
|
<a href="/extra.html">[ Extra ]</a>
|
|
<hr/>
|
|
</nav>
|
|
|
|
<h1>Spring Break 2023</h1>
|
|
<p>It{{ body_area }}#39;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>
|
|
<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>
|
|
<p>Last week, me and my cousin wanted to try out Apple{{ body_area }}#39;s fitness competition feature that works with Apple Watch. It works
|
|
by giving you 1 point for every percent you complete of your move, exercise, and stand goals with a point cap of 600
|
|
per day. The issue with it was that it didn{{ body_area }}#39;t work at all, not syncing on time if at all. I want to build a clone of it
|
|
with some additional features such as:</p>
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li><p><strong>Notifications:</strong> I didn{{ body_area }}#39;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>
|
|
</li>
|
|
<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{{ body_area }}#39;s progress. </p>
|
|
</li>
|
|
<li><p><strong>Custom Competitions:</strong> I think it{{ body_area }}#39;d be nice to have competitions with custom rules and lengths so that you{{ body_area }}#39;re not stuck with only one setting. Settings could include custom duration and custom caps on points.</p>
|
|
</li>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
<p>I{{ body_area }}#39;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
|
|
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>
|
|
<p>I{{ body_area }}#39;ve created my own hosting/cloud service called <a href="https://nws.nickorlow.com">Nick Web Services</a>. It currently allows people to deploy
|
|
dockerized applications on my geo-distributed k8s clusters running on Dell Poweredge servers. In order to actually deploy this, I
|
|
had to manually create the Kubernetes manifest files and then ssh into each individual server and apply them. I{{ body_area }}#39;ve setup
|
|
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>
|
|
<p>Currently, the service works for deployment but only if you don{{ body_area }}#39;t want to use SSL or you use Cloudflare{{ body_area }}#39;s flexible SSL
|
|
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.
|
|
I{{ body_area }}#39;d like to complete part of this implementation during the break.</p>
|
|
<h2 id="verifiedbot">VerifiedBot</h2>
|
|
<p><code>JavaScript, Rust</code></p>
|
|
<p>This project isn{{ body_area }}#39;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>.
|
|
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
|
|
(qualtrics), we could have users verify themselves by using the university{{ body_area }}#39;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{{ body_area }}#39;s SSO before filling out a survey.
|
|
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
|
|
due to a bug in qualtrics, it wasn{{ body_area }}#39;t working properly. It seems that this bug has been fixed and we can start rolling it out.</p>
|
|
<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
|
|
friendly. Last year, I made some improvements to make it usable on mobile but it still doesn{{ body_area }}#39;t feel quite right. I also
|
|
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
|
|
friend <a href="https://raulhigareda.com">Raul{{ body_area }}#39;s Website</a>. I{{ body_area }}#39;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{{ body_area }}#39;m seeing it being used more and more
|
|
and would like to get some exposure to it.</p>
|
|
<h2 id="mahantongo">Mahantongo</h2>
|
|
<p><code>Rust, PostgreSQL</code></p>
|
|
<p>I{{ body_area }}#39;m one of the members of the Community Team that runs some UT Computer Science community Discord servers.
|
|
Currently, a Discord bot called Carlbot provides us a star-board, which is a specific channel where messages that 5 or more people
|
|
react to with a star emoji get posted. It{{ body_area }}#39;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 {{ body_area }}#39;*-board{{ body_area }}#39; channels where you can create multiple star-board
|
|
like channels but with custom emojis. I{{ body_area }}#39;m writing it in Rust and I{{ body_area }}#39;m just hoping to use this project to get more acquainted with the language.</p>
|
|
|
|
<footer>
|
|
<hr />
|
|
<p style="margin-bottom: 0px;">Copyright © Nicholas Orlowsky 2023</p>
|
|
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">Hosting provided by <a href="https://nws.nickorlow.com">NWS</a></p>
|
|
<p style="margin-top: 0px;">Powered by <a href="https://github.com/nickorlow/anthracite">Anthracite Web Server</a></p>
|
|
</footer>
|
|
</body>
|