Nick Harris

I went to a local meetup last night, with presentations on different topics around web development. One of them was on SVG graphics, and how to manipulate them with CSS.SVG graphics aren’t images, but HTML in an <svg> tag. It’s supported by pretty much every browser. In the HTML that makes up the graphic, there…Read More

While browsing the SpigotMC forums, I found a forum post in which the author used a combination of the input packet and custom Minecraft map rendering to create a nice looking GUI.  To use these GUIs, you hold the map in your main hand. It mounts you onto a fake entity, so the client will…Read More

There’s a programming bootcamp in Silicon Valley called 42. It’s a 3-5 year program, during which you learn different programming languages and get work experience by going through internships with their partners.To begin, you send in an application, answering basic questions. If accepted, you would then go to the next step, the piscine. You would…Read More

I’ve always felt that structures have never really been taken full advantage of, especially as the format and official support makes it a better alternative to WorldEdit/MCEdit schematics. It isn’t in the Bukkit API yet, either, despite the fact that it would make perfect sense to access from a Spigot plugin. At the moment, you can…Read More

Back in October, I helped fund the Kickstarter for the X-bows keyboard. The main feature of the keyboard is that it’s ergonomic. The keyboard is shaped in a way that forces you to rotate your hands, instead of positioning your hands straight from your wrists. The project was funded both on Kickstarter and then later…Read More

Every day a new Minecraft server is started on, usually hoping to become the next Hypixel and become a popular server. Within a month or two, though, 95% of these servers die. Mainly, it’s just lack of a player base who actually would play on their network. Each of these networks usually have the following…Read More

I’ve been using Kotlin regularly for all the projects I would normally have done in Java for the past six months at least. Kotlin is a JVM programming language which compiles into Java bytecode. The difference is how the syntax is written before it’s compiled. Kotlin basically removes the repetitive areas in Java (notably getters…Read More

Whenever someone wanted to share a Minecraft build, it was done by either sharing the Minecraft world for someone to load up and look around at, or is a schematic file for pasting into an existing world. Schematics were largely more popular, since servers could use it in combination with WorldEdit or MCEdit to paste…Read More

One of the confusing things I encountered whenever trying to look behind the scenes of the Bukkit API is what CraftBukkit, Bukkit, and Spigot referred to. Recently I’ve been looking at the source a lot more, and am even contributing towards it as well.Years ago, Bukkit was DMCA’d by one of it’s own developers. A…Read More

The most useful discovery I’ve ever made in programming wasn’t actually a programming feature, but being able to use the debug features present in most IDEs. Debugging is one of the most difficult and mind-numbing tasks in programming, and makes up a large part of the programming process.Debugging in the IDE usually revolves around something…Read More