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AHC_4374

Why and How to Write Good How-To Articles

Part of contributing to any open source project, or even really being a contributing member of any community, is sharing what you know. That can come in many forms. While many projects over emphasis code, and most of us understand the value of conference talks, good how-to articles are some of the most critical contributions for any software platform. There isn’t much point to a tool if people cannot figure out how to use it. ...

February 27, 2021 · 7 min · Aaron Crosman

Salesforce Lightning Web Components with URL Parameters

A couple weeks ago I needed to create a Salesforce Lightning Web Component (LWC) that pulls values from URL parameters. While the process is very simple it turns out the vast majority of examples on the web are out of date due to a security update Salesforce made sometime last year – and so I spent a frustrating afternoon throwing ideas at the wall until a colleague stumbled into a comment on a blog post that was an incorrect example by a highly trusted expert noting the needed fix. So, in the hopes of shortening the search for anyone else trying to get this to work, I’m offering an example that works – at least as of this writing. ...

January 31, 2021 · 5 min · Aaron Crosman

Salesforce Electron Starter

Back in August I created an Electron project starter that provides a template to use for electron projects with the goal of outlining how to follow the current best practices for writing secure electron apps. I had extracted that from a couple of personal projects I work on from time to time, one of those projects is ElectronForce – a tool to explore Salesforce orgs. Because I get ideas of things I want to try out from time to time as Salesforce APIs applications I have now created a derivative project that is setup to create apps that leverage JSForce to interact with Salesforce orgs. ...

December 26, 2020 · 3 min · Aaron Crosman

Generate Sample Data for Salesforce NPSP

Snowfakery is a fairly new tool from the team at Salesforce.org. It is designed to generate any amount of arbitrary relational data you can cook up. The Salesforce Open Source Commons Data Generation Toolkit Project has been starting to work on including it in our work (you can read more about my relationship to these projects on the Attain blog) and as part of that, and as part of my actual day job, I’ve been playing with its recipe language, reviewing the documentation, and generally trying to make sure I can use it well. ...

November 21, 2020 · 3 min · Aaron Crosman

SC DUG October 2020: Getting Started in Consulting

This month’s SC DUG featured Mauricio Orozco posing questions about getting started as a consultant to long-time members who have all done some work with Drupal as a consultant. If you would like to join us please check out our upcoming events on Meetup for meeting times, locations, and remote connection information. ...

October 24, 2020 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman

RBG Aiken Memorial

As the constitutional historian at USCA, Beth was asked to speak about Justice Ginsburg’s contributions to the law over the course of her life. Her full remarks are below, followed by pictures I took at the event. May her memory be a blessing. The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Rosh Hashanah. In the Jewish tradition, that makes her a person of great righteousness. May her memory be a blessing. What that means is not may we remember her to comfort ourselves, but may we remember her through our acts. May we continue her legacy, may we fight for those who are marginalized, may we fight for what is right and just, and may we defend her vision of gender equality, may we will into being her belief that “women belong in all places where decisions are being made.” ...

September 22, 2020 · 7 min · Aaron Crosman

SCDUG August 2020 – "Good Enough" Testing Plans

This month I gave a talk at SCDUG on encouraging creating testing plans for teams that have been resistant for any number of reasons. This talk is meant to help people argue for the value of testing, and help you create a testing plan that will save more resources that it costs. This was an initial draft of that talk that I’ll be giving a revised and improved version of at Drupal Camp Atlanta in September. ...

August 15, 2020 · 1 min · Aaron Crosman

Simple Electron Starter

Earlier today I push my Electron Simple Starter to Github. It has dependencies only to Electron, Electron Debug, and ESlint (but no specific settings, you can add those yourself). All the basic pieces are in place to encourage good security practices. It will run without warnings or errors, and puts in place all plumbing you need for their current inter-process communication, default overrides, and process sandboxing to help you write a secure app. ...

August 2, 2020 · 3 min · Aaron Crosman

SCDUG July 2020 – Drupal in SC State Government

Mauricio Orozco from the SC Commission for Minority Affairs gave a talk about the state of Drupal within the SC State government. In recent years Drupal has grown from a tool used on a small number of projects to the platform of choice for all new agency sites. He spoke about the state’s initiative to move more to Drupal, South Carolina Interactive and their role in supporting government projects, which agencies are moving toward Drupal, and how this is benefiting residents of South Carolina. ...

July 15, 2020 · 2 min · Aaron Crosman

Protests in America – Black Lives Matter

Over the last few weeks the US has been moved to action about policing and racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. As someone who is deeply concerned about these issues I always struggle to find words I feel do the topic justice; they seem too important to stay silent, too critical to speak about poorly, and too complex for me to write about well. For my limitations in what follows, I’m sorry. ...

July 1, 2020 · 7 min · Aaron Crosman