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Keeping the Spark Cool: A Tale of Two Nodes and a British Summer

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You know it’s a proper British summer when the Met Office is issuing records and your DIY rack build is sweating.

Turns out Tuesday 26 May 2026 is officially the hottest May day ever recorded in the UK. 35.1°C at Kew Gardens in London. The day before had already broken the previous record (34.8°C, also Kew Gardens), making it the second consecutive day the May and spring temperature record was provisionally shattered. Parts of Britain hit heatwave thresholds — the kind of temperatures we normally associate with mid-July, not the end of May.

Why Token Maxing is a Garbage Metric for Developer Productivity

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a new metric creeping into some engineering orgs, dressed up in fancy AI vocabulary: token count. The idea sounds seductive at first glance — if developers are using AI coding assistants, why not measure how many tokens they generate? More tokens = more output. It’s just basic numbers, right?

Wrong. It’s one of the worst productivity metrics you can imagine, and it has a long, embarrassing lineage.

The Ghost of Lines of Code Past

Let’s be clear — this isn’t new. “Lines of code” (LOC) has been the go-to misguided productivity metric for decades. And every senior engineer will tell you the same thing: it’s garbage.

Unboxing the NVIDIA DGX Spark: An AI Supercomputer on My Desk

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The box arrived yesterday. It’s smaller than I expected — a square package that sits comfortably on the corner of my desk, next to my keyboard. Inside was the DGX Spark, and a few accessories.

Not a lot. Because the magic isn’t in the accessories. It’s in what’s inside that white, minimalist case.

What Is the DGX Spark?

NVIDIA calls it “an AI supercomputer on your desk.” That’s not entirely marketing hyperbole. This is a purpose-built desktop AI workstation powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip — a 20-core ARM processor with a custom NVIDIA GPU, all sitting on a single chip.

Setting Up a Hugo Blog on Netlify (The Easy Way)

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I walked through hosting a Hugo blog on AWS S3 with CloudFront. It works, but let’s be honest — it’s a lot of moving parts. S3 bucket, CloudFront distribution, IAM policies, DNS records, cache invalidation. If your blog is the only thing on the line, that’s a fair bit of overhead.

A few people asked whether there’s a simpler way. There is.

This post covers hosting the same Hugo blog on Netlify — the zero-config, free HTTPS, push-to-deploy alternative.

Setting Up a Hugo Blog on AWS S3 with Custom Domain

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This guide walks through setting up a Hugo blog on AWS S3 with a custom domain — perfect for your personal blog or portfolio.

Overview

Here’s the pipeline we’ll set up:

Markdown → Hugo Build → S3 Static Host → CloudFront CDN → blog.example.com

Hugo generates static HTML from markdown
S3 hosts the files as a static website
CloudFront provides caching, HTTPS, and better performance
Ionos DNS routes your subdomain to CloudFront

Prerequisites

Hugo installed
AWS account with access to S3 and CloudFront
Domain/subdomain in Ionos (e.g., blog.example.com)

Step 1: Build Your Hugo Site

cd /workspace/hugo-blog
hugo --minify

This generates a public/ directory with all static files.

My First Post

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first blog post, written in Markdown and generated with Hugo.

Why Hugo?

Hugo is a fast, flexible static site generator. It lets me write in plain Markdown and produces static HTML that can be hosted anywhere — including AWS S3.

How It Works

Write content in Markdown (content/en/posts/*.md)
Run hugo --minify to build
Deploy to Netlify
Done!

Example Code

Here is a Python snippet:

def hello():
 print("Hello from my Hugo blog!")
 for i in range(10):
 print(f" Post {i + 1} live")

And a Bash example:

About

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About This Blog

I’m a professional engineer by training, but the majority of what I know wasn’t taught to me in a classroom. I learned by building things — and by breaking them, and then figuring out why they broke. It’s called life experience.

The kind of engineering that gets measured on a resume — degrees, titles, years of experience — it doesn’t mean much if you can’t deploy something that works. The kind that matters is the kind you build yourself: a server you configured from scratch, an API that handles real traffic, a pipeline that turns code into a live service without someone holding your hand. This blog is about that second kind of learning. The self-taught kind. The kind that doesn’t come from a syllabus but from curiosity, stubbornness, and the willingness to spend three hours debugging something that turns out to be a typo.

Projects

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This section is under construction.

I’ve got a few things in the works — they’ll be here when they’re ready.