Bits, Bobs & Breakpoints — Aaron Holmes

Browser-Based URL and vCard QR Code Generator# 25 May 2026 JavaScript, QR Code, SVG, Utility, Frontend This is a single HTML file that turns a URL or vCard contact details into a QR code and saves it as a scalable SVG - handy for business cards, signage,…

Interview Coding Take-Homes: Part 3# 15 December 2025 Programming, Software, Interviewing UCLA Health - Population Analysis# This take-home was about the data ingestion and cleaning population data.

Interview Coding Take-Homes: Part 2.b# 28 August 2025 Programming, Software, Interviewing UCLA Health - Terraform Module# This take-home was for a Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer position in a key IT organization at UCLA Health.

Interview Coding Take-Homes: Part 2.a# 18 August 2025 Programming, Software, Interviewing UCLA Health - Maze Bug# This take-home was for a Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer position in a key IT organization at UCLA Health.

Interview Coding Take-Homes: Part 1# 3 August 2025 Programming, Software, Interviewing As software engineers, we are frequently asked to demonstrate our ability to architect and implement software.

Making a Copper Wire Tree# 8 August 2024 Plants, Crafts This presentation shows the steps I took to create a wire tree out of copper wire in the shape of an informal upright bonsai.

Winter is Canning 2022# 22 September 2022 Programming, Software This presentation shows the steps I took to prepare for this years 6-month long “Winter is Canning” challenge.

Pair Programming# 6 April 2022 Programming, Software Why should you pair program, and how do you do it?

My Dog Cleo# 28 October 2021 Dog This presentation is about my Great Dane, Cleo.

Types in Software# 21 April 2021 Programming, Software This presentation is about types in software, why they are important, and what they do to help us.

Displaying response headers and pretty JSON with cURL# 19 September 2019 HTTP, Bash, curl, Utility, Productivity, Shell The Problem# I tend toward using cURL when testing HTTP services, but I had a difficult time parsing the result when these services spit

The Behavior of C# Nested Static Classes# 26 July 2018 C#, .NET, Experimental, Documentation While working on a code review, I found a nested static class that I needed to verify the validity of.

Transparent Video in all Browsers from Cross-Domain Sources# 6 January 2017 JavaScript, Canvas, Experimental, AJAX, XMLHttpRequest, Video A brief history of time cross-domain transparent video# Transparent video is not a terribly new concept in web develo…

Using Git with the .git directory outside the Git repository directory# 19 August 2016 Git, Git-Bash, Bash I have a particular use case where I want to use Git on top of another version control system.

Simple Way to Prevent Websites Jumping from Scrollbars# 1 April 2016 CSS A common occurance I see on websites, and a frequent question I see as well regards websites “jumping” when more content loads onto the page and a scrollbar becomes visible in the br…

Two short ack filetype definitions for TypeScript# 9 February 2016 ack, TypeScript I search my TypeScript code a lot and finally got tired of using awk, grep, and friends to filter out irrelevant files.

Simple programming patterns and conventions# 24 December 2015 Patterns, Conventions, Programming I thought it might be helpful to some developers to see some simple patterns and conventions in a variety of languages.

Printing function body in Chrome’s console# 1 July 2015 Chrome Chrome used to, by default, print a function body in the console if you entered a function name into it, or if you called console.log() with a function name.

Reading an HTTP Request Response Body from Exceptions# 16 April 2015 C#, .NET, HTTP, Debugging Every so often I need to read the response body of a failed HTTP request while debugging a .NET application in Visual Studio.

Circuit Scribe art project step #3# 25 January 2015 Circuit-Scribe, Circuit-Scribe-Seattle I finally took the time to start maping out where I’ll need to draw my Circuit Scribe ink lines.

Circuit Scribe art project step #2# 20 January 2015 Circuit-Scribe, Circuit-Scribe-Seattle I put another hour into this and started sketching out the buildings surrounding the Space Needle.

Circuit Scribe art project step #1# 19 January 2015 Circuit-Scribe, Circuit-Scribe-Seattle I finally started my “cityscape” project with Circuit Scribe!

Writing AngularJS directives as TypeScript classes# 12 January 2015 JavaScript, TypeScript, AngularJS, Directives Introduction# TL;DR?

Using Time as a Color Generator# 20 December 2014 JavaScript, CSS, Codepen, Fiddle, Experimental The idea# I saw the site What colour is it?

Speech Synthesis on Windows Phone 8.1# 7 December 2014 C#, .NET, Windows-Phone, Speech I recently wrote an application to make my phone report current Los Angeles traffic conditions.

My Ghost theme; Casper for developers# 1 December 2014 Ghost I started using Ghost about a week ago.

Displaying code with Ace on Ghost# 28 November 2014 Ghost, Ace, Theme, JavaScript, CSS After getting Ghost set up, I was disappointed to see the lack of syntax highlighting in Casper’s codeblocks.

JavaScript Vector Animations with Divs or Canvas# 28 November 2014 JavaScript, Canvas, Pixi.js, Animation, Codepen, GitHub, Fiddle See the Pen Vector Animations by Aaron Holmes (@aholmes) on CodePen.

Running Entity Framework Migrations on Application Start# 28 November 2014 C#, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, .NET Entity Framework is an ORM developed by Microsoft.