Aaron wolf

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve updated my website!

When I first built it, I designed it so that all content updates would happen automatically via API calls. That was over 3 years ago. Over time, though, I realized that approach wasn’t the best fit for what I wanted, So I decided to rebuild it from the ground up.

The original version was made with the now deprecated Create React App, but this new site is powered by Docusaurus, another React framework from Meta designed for building blogs and documentation.

The overall look is mostly the same, with a few small tweaks, but the biggest change is the addition of the Blog and Docs sections.

Things are a work in progress right now. I'm currently working on writing the docs for the Python language reference. At the time of publishing I had just finished the string section, and I'm moving on to int!

I hope you enjoy exploring the new site and check back often for updates!

Overview​

The URL object in JavaScript provides a way to work with and manipulate URLs easily. It’s particularly useful when you need to construct, parse, or modify URLs within your code.

async / await is a newer way of writing asynchronous code compared to promises. The main advantages of async/await are improved readability and the avoidance of promise chaining. Promises can become long, hard to read, and may contain deeply nested callbacks that can be difficult to debug.

Restaurants​

A promise in JavaScript is just a pending task. It’s like ordering food at a restaurant: when you place your order, the server makes a promise to bring the food you ordered. Once the food is brought to the table the promise has been fulfilled. If the food you ordered can’t be served because the kitchen is out of a key ingredient, then you can catch a meal somewhere else.

This is the final section of my series on encryption... at least for now. Maybe I'll think of some other topics to cover.

You can clone my encryption demo repo and run the code from this article on your own machine.

Intro to hashing​

Hashing is a one way function that's used in encryption scenarios where the goal is secure storage, data integrity, and verification. The original use that led to the creation of hashing functions was digital signatures. It's basically a function that creates a summary of the whole, but the whole cannot be extrapolated from the hash.

RSA Encryption overview​

RSA was invented by NORAD in the early 1970's but was deemed top secret. A few years later in 1977, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman independantly invented the exact same process for encryption and called it RSA. RSA is the most used software in the world to date and every internet user has used RSA at some point whether they knew it or not.

History​

The most advanced method of encryption during WWII (the enigma machine) was broken by a guy who built a computer (Alan Turing).

In the decades following WWII the US was in a cold war with the USSR. Computers were being built in order to gain intelligence and monitor what the Soviets were doing. NORAD (part of the US and Canada's military complex) created the first networked computer system and they wanted secure communication so that no bad actors could eavesdrop on secret military communication.

Intro​

This will be a series on Encryption.

It was my turn to give presentation to my work colleagues at our weekly meetings. Instead of talking about the usual webdev / JavaScript / Framework of the week, I spoke about the fundamentals of cryptography (it made me nostalgic for grad school). I think it's good and important to have an understanding of the basics of how our wonderful internet operates.

This will be split up into several posts. This first one is just an introduction on the topic.

We all know that dates in JavaScript suck. Temporal is the API that we will come to succeed the legacy date API in JavaScript. This post is about my experience with the new Temporal API.

At the moment (no pun intended), Temporal is still in stage 3 (out of 4) of development. This means that it should not be used in development, but if you're curious on how to use it you can still use the Temporal polyfill.

Intro​

In this tutorial I will show how to make a Drag and Drop component from scratch with no 3rd party libraries using React.

Important info​

1. There exists the event handler e.dataTransfer which helps with drag and drop functionality, but as we're using React I find using state to be simpler.

2. Make sure to check out the Code Sandbox. I may add a few things that aren't reflected below, but the code below is complete.

3. You might know a better way to do this! If you think you can improve the code please comment.