Aaron Crowder

I have tinkered with this blog on and off for years. In fact, I've had a blog at some URL in some form going back over two decades. My inability to stick with a single URL or publishing platform should be documented and studied. Nevertheless here I am writing about yet another blog refresh. I won't say this will be the last, nor will I pontificate about how this platform was custom built for me by me to grow with me. I will simply continue to write here or I won't. Only time will tell. If you...

Have you ever noticed the "verified" badge next to a commit on GitHub? A few years ago I did an wondered how I could get that on my own commits. After a little googling I realized it was because those commits were signed. Signing a commit with a GPG key is something natively supported by Git as it turns out. Now this is one of the first things I set up on a new dev machine. Setting it up is fairly straight forward. Prerequisites You will need to have gpg and git installed. Additionally you w...

Today is Father's day, a day where we celebrate the dad's in our lives. Rather than write an appreciation post though, I wanted to write about something that men everywhere can do better. That's why I decided to write about apologizing. It's something that few men do, and even fewer do well. Even worse I've seen so many instances lately where men are directly asked to apologize and refuse to. But the point of this post isn't to call anyone out. It's meant to educate everyone on what a good a...

Yesterday I took part in the Hour of Code at my local high school as a volunteer. In fact, it was at the high school that I attended. I had a lot of fun and I was excited to see the stundents gain a deeper understanding of code. I was especially impressed with the number of young women in the class that seemed to really enjoy it. It's a really common misunderstanding that people hold that girls aren't interested in tech. I think in too many cases they are steered in other directions, towards...

I often have need to build layout's that vary depending on the content put in them. I can't always count on that content being the same (cough CMSs cough). It's just one of those things you have to do. One thing I'm having to do a lot though, is making the body of a page take up a certain amount of space so that the footer doesn't look weird. In the past I've used JavaScript to make the footer take up the remaining space on the page if the content didn't take up enough. I never really liked t...

Call Calls a function, with the specified arguments passed in The first argument becomes this, the rest are passed in as regular arguments. Using call allows you to maintain the scope of this accross methods. It works like this: Here we're using prototypical inheritance to allow us to inheirit properties from Animal in Dog and Cat. Using call allows us to invoke Animal to initialize it's properties while maintaining the correct scope. Apply Calls a function, with the specified arguments pas...

1. Subject Line The Subject Line is the first line of your commit message. Often the subject alone is enough, but if it's not and you need a body be sure to separate the subject and body with a blank line. First line of a commit message Often the only part you'll need Separated from the body by a blank line Soft limit of 50 characters, hard limit of 69 Github's interface truncates the subject line at 69 characters Capitalize! Don't end with a period Use the imperative mood Git itself uses th...

Adding named properties to arrays in JavaScript can be handy in a few different cases. For instance: You need a nice formatted title / description for a data set. Rather than having multiple objects you can use named properties and get away with only using one. You want to add some functions to an array for whatever reason Lots of other reasons that I can't think of right now! Basically, this just buys you a nice way to encapsulate all the data you might need, without having to use an objec...

I'm at Angle Brackets. I've decided that I wanted to try taking all my notes in vim. I LOVE using vim. It's a really awesome, powerful, and extendable command-line editor. I enjoy that it's really distraction free. Being distracted is something that I struggle with so I really look for ways to stay focused. I write in Markdown as well. It's a great way to get a simple, clean, well formatted plain text document that can be processed and produce HTML. One of the biggest things I look for in a M...