Recent content in Blog on Nick Sloan
Together with my friends Jessica , Chris , and Sean , it is my pleasure to present Studioworks, a platform for creative businesses. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 We spent 2025 building our first product: an invoicing platform designed for…
When Sean and I set out to build Studioworks, we made the decision to build with Swift. It was an unconventional choice that we knew would come with some risks, but we cut our teeth building web apps with PHP before it got good, so a little bit of trail blazing didn’t bother us. Still, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about why we chose to build with Swift, and I wanted to write it down from my…
I spend a lot more time trying to eliminate barriers to writing than actually writing, but I’ve come up with a pretty good setup using off the shelf tools (which lowers the maintenance burden). 
 My site is hosted on AWS Amplify, though Netlify or even GitHub Pages (with a bit more configuration) could work just as well. 
 My site is built using Hugo, and the Hugo builds are run by Amplify…
This blog isn’t all that complex. A bit of CSS, a bit of JS (only for fun; press G), some fonts, and a whole bunch of HTML. No images to speak of, at least as of this writing. It’s not exactly slow to load, even with empty caches across the board. 
 But until recently the best case was only somewhat better than the worst. All static responses included Amplify’s default Cache-Control header:…
There are so many people advocating for the use of URLProtocol for mocking HTTP requests in Swift that I couldn’t believe how quickly it fell apart for me. In fact, I found more writing about using URLProtocol as a mock than I did about using URLProtocol for its intended purpose. This post is about the shortcomings that I encountered, and how I solved them by mocking URLSession instead. 
 The…
As I was preparing to travel to a family wedding recently, I decided to take action on an item that has been on my to-do list for some time: get better internet access for my devices while traveling. 
 Motivation 
 Hotel Wi-Fi is such a pain. I travel with a stupid number of devices, and getting all of them connected can take a lot of effort. At home each TV has a Chromecast with Google TV…