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Body Doubling Night

by Aaron Crowder on

My girlfriend Azure and I sometimes do body doubling night where we each take part in our own hobbies in the same room as each other. It's a great way to spend time together and still have our own interests. Azure Azure's been working on her alcohol ink art. She's getting really good! I love watching her create art. Aaron I've been working on my blog (of course lol). I created a workable posting interface from the front-end of this blog. It's what I'm using to write this post (mostly as a t...

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IndieWeb Foundations

by Aaron Crowder on

I have been fascinated by the IndieWeb community for years. I have participated on and off as well, using this URL even. But my website has gone through so many iterations over the years that I've long since lost all that content. This iteration of my blog is designed to be the start of my IndieWeb comeback story. It's a project, which always seems to help keep me engaged. Like all software, it will never be "done", and thus will always give me something to work on when I have time to work on...

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Resume Website

by Aaron Crowder on

This month marks 4 years at Govalo. I started as a staff engineer and have since been promoted twice (lead engineer, then chief engineer). It's been a wild, exciting, difficult, and fulfilling ride. I've grown more the past 4 years than I think I have at any other job. Sadly all good things, however good they are, must surely come to an end. We're approaching the end of my tenure at Govalo. At the end of this month I will be officially without full-time employment. Thankfully I've got some co...

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Blog Refresh: Django

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Signing Git Commits

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Hour of Code

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Using vh with calc In CSS

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Managing Scope Using Call, Apply, and Bind

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Anatomy of a Commit Message

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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JavaScript: Array's with named Properties

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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