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A website about programming, technology, and life.

Tag: life

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

Art

Azure's been working on her alcohol ink art. She's getting really good! I love watching her create art.

Aaron

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 test).

Post Editor

The post editor allows me to select the post type:

Post type selector

It allows me to enter a title and edit content. It even includes a markdown preview!

Editor title and content

I can then select tags...

Tag selector

And finally upload images:

Image uploader

This interface is going to make posting here so much easier and more enjoyable. I'm excited about what features I'll be building next!

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 consulting work going at the moment.

I could probably make a good go of doing consulting full-time, but I've decided that the best course of action for myself and my family is to seek new full-time employment. After Govalo I'm ready for something that's a bit more technically challenging.

Aaron Crowder Codes

Thus, Aaron Crowder Codes has been born. This website is a simple NextJS app. It acts as a simple hosted webiste version of my resume. It highlights my past jobs and experience as well as providing details for contacting me. Nothing special, but I'm really hapy with the way it turned out.

Hire Me

If you're reading this and you'd like to chat about hiring me feel free to check out my resume website (link above) and get in touch!

I'm excited about this next chapter, whatever it may bring.

Hour of Code

by Aaron Crowder on

Hour of Code: Star Wars

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 things they should be interested in. I'm glad to have been able to give all the kids an opportunity to see if programming is a career they'd be interested in.

We did the Star Wars tutorial on Code.org (because duh, Star Wars). After a brief introduction from me I turned them lose and walked around the room answering questions. I think that was my favorite part; hearing the questions from the kids.

I think the most common question I was asked was this:

How do I make my game end when they get to a certain number of points?

It showed that they were thinking about a specific problem and going about it logically. They just needed a little help getting the code right since the Code.org workspace didn't have a built-in way to do that. The solution I helped the kids implement was this (this is, of course, mostly psedo code):

var points = 0;
var pointsToWin = 500;

function whenAddPoints(points) {
    points += points;

    if(points >= pointsToWin) {
        endGame("win");
    }
}

I was able to compile a list of links to all their games. In the interest of privacy I'm not going to share any names here, but here's the links to their games!