Nicolas Ventura
As of 11 August 2026, there have been 98 posts published.
Composting
27 March 2025 I've been practicing trench composting for over a year now in my small garden. It's been a good way to eliminate waste and improve soil health. By putting food scraps back in the ground, it adds nutrients to the soil, sparking life and feeding my plants. It also gets me going outside and a good discipline to hold myself to - not to mention the more time I spend at my garden, the more I'll inadvertently care for it. However there's some plant-related topics I want to get off my chest. Read more
Speed of Driving
07 January 2025 It's a little stressful when you're driving exactly the speed limit (of course, I would never go beyond the posted speed limit) and someone zooms by you at 10, 15, or sometimes 20+ miles per hour. As a bonus, these people will usually weave through traffic too. What's so important that you'd risk your life, and several other peoples', to save some time? Maybe, man's gotta poo. Who knows? But something I do think about, is how much time are they actually saving, assuming they don't get into a crash or stopped by the police? Read more
Custom Domains in Gmail
23 December 2024 I'm reviving an old series here. This one branches off of story #5, where I split up my Gmail account to use a custom email for each online account. But now, instead of exposing my Gmail account, I can use one of the custom domains I own to send and receive emails, directly in my Gmail mail client, for free! For example, I can now send and receive emails from an address like example@nicfv.com. It was an adventure to figure out this project and quite a lengthy headache at times. Read more
2024: A Year for nicfv
19 December 2024 2024 was a big year! I completed and exceeded both of my New Year's resolutions, did a lot of running, visited 2 new countries, and worked on a lot of cool projects. Let's go over the 2024 recap for this mysterious individual named Nicolas Ventura. Read more
Owning Property, (Almost) Two Years Later
08 December 2024 It's crazy to think, but coming up on two years now, I purchased my condo. I absolutely love it and have no regrets, but there are some things I wish I had considered. Here's a short story of what I wished I could tell myself those 2 years ago, and things (specific to me) that are really important in finding a place to live. Read more
Connecting to Public Wifi
07 December 2024 I'm currently writing this from my laptop running Kubuntu 24.04 in a public space; Peet's Coffee. (The matcha latte here is good.) I had some difficulty connecting to the public wifi. Luckily, I had my smartphone with me, which gave me options. Read more
Working with an NPM Monorepo
07 December 2024 It's no secret that I'm developing a series of npm packages. The primary reason I'm doing this is for code reuse. I want to build up more complex programs using as much of my own software as possible. Second, the packages I'm developing might also benefit other developers. Also, the secret third reason I'm doing this is just for fun. Although there have been times where I really questioned my secret third reason. One of those recent times was when I changed my development strategy from maintaining several independent repositories to maintaining just one monorepo containing all my packages. Read more
Crossing the Road Philosophy
25 November 2024 Anything can be a lot like the game of rock, paper, scissors, if you try hard enough. At least, it ought to be. I'll use this analogy for my proposed rules for crossing the road. It's a dangerous game, and maybe this idea could make it a bit safer. Read more
Supercomputing Conference, Atlanta
17 November 2024 Every year, thousands of tech giants, computer nerds, and NERSC staff alike flock to the conference on Supercomputing. Normally, from NERSC there's such high demand to attend that many staff are denied travel assistance. Maybe since it was my first time, I got a free pass. Several of my colleagues went the year prior and only had good things to say, so I wanted to know what it was like for myself, and maybe learn a thing or two along the way. Read more
Cost of Driving to Work
12 November 2024 I don't think many people like driving to work. Some might - I personally love driving, but not when I have to. It makes me wonder, how much does it cost to drive for work-related purposes? I've developed a formula that takes into account not only the cost for gas, but also the cost of overhead services and opportunity cost associated with the time spent commuting to and from work. Read more