 Courses from Alyssa Nicoll

HTML 5 is the structure of our web pages. It is the markup that represents the DOM (document object model).

html

Black is getting awfully boring, let’s add some color to our shapes. 
 
We can use the `fillStyle` method on our `context` to add colors. In this lesson we will look at how we can pass color names, hex values, and rgba values as strings to `fillStyle` to add colors to our graphics. 
 
We’ll also show why the order of where you call methods on `context` matters.

Add color to graphics using HTML Canvas

Let's take a look at a bug you can run across, by not specifying `height` and `width` of your HTML `canvas` element.
We will look at giving the `canvas` element a `height` and `width`  property inline. 
We’ll also look at how we can alternatively give `canvas` those `height` and `width` properties right in our Javascript.

 Specifying Height and Width on the Canvas Element

Circles are one of the most difficult and prestigious shapes to achieve in Canvas. No circle method is provided, instead, we must utilize the [.arc](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/canvas_arc.asp) method to achieve circle happiness. 

The `.arc` method however is a bit funny, it doesn’t use degrees like we’re used to, instead it uses radians. So in this lesson we’ll also learn how we can use some maths to be able to enter the familiar degrees. 

Draw circles in HTML Canvas using .arc

In this lesson we will look at the dangers of not closing your circles. So we’ll have to learn to build the habit of always closing our paths.

We also cover giving circles `stroke`, along with specifying strokes styles such as `lineWidth`, `strokeStyle`, and `fillStyle`. 

Add strokes to circles using HTML Canvas

You might think that drawing a piece of a pie possible with the `.arc` method. However, in this lesson, you'll see why that is impossible. Instead we must draw a pie piece with the [.arcTo](https://www.w3schools.com/tags/canvas_arcto.asp) `canvas` method. 

`.arcTo` takes `x1`, `y1`, `x2`, `y2` and `radius` to draw a nifty arc shape. You then must use the `moveTo` and `lineTo` methods to complete the beautiful piece of a pie. As a bonus, the `clearRect` method is used to demonstrate clearing the `canvas`!

Use HTML Canvas arcTo, moveTo, and lineTo to draw a piece of a pie chart

Being able to draw shapes is cool and all, but we want to add interactivity to our graphics! 
In this lesson, we will learn how to add `'click'` handlers to our `canvas` elements using the `addEventListener` method. 

Add click interaction to HTML Canvas using JavaScript events


It’s really fun to work with graphics when building apps and websites, but how do you get started? HTML5 has a technology called **Canvas** that lets us draw graphics to our screens. We can do everything from making basic shapes to creating complex interactive games and animations! 

In this course, we will learn the basics of using **Canvas**. We’ll start by learning how to create a canvas on an HTML page. Next we will learn how to draw and style with fills and strokes. Finally, we will add interactivity to canvas elements.

Draw in HTML Canvas

It’s really fun to work with graphics when building apps and websites, but how do you get started? HTML5 has a technology called **Canvas** that lets us draw graphics to our screens. We can do everything from making basic shapes to creating complex interactive games and animations!

 In this course, we will learn the basics of using **Canvas**. We’ll start by learning how to create a canvas on an HTML page. Next we will learn how to draw and style with fills and strokes. Finally, we will add interactivity to canvas elements.

Create Graphics with HTML Canvas

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

Learn how to create tabs with nothing more than good ole' CSS. Look Ma, No Javascript!

**note:** *This approach has some accessibility issues. To make a tab component that is properly accessible, it requires some JavaScript.*

Create a tab component using vanilla CSS

Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.

scss

This lesson covers flexbox in a reusable mixin that should cover most layout situations on your site. With variables and common defaults, this mixin will cover most alignment issues and replace the need for tables for all time. Need a column with each item evenly spaced but starting their alignment on the top? No problem! How about a row with the items evenly spaced out as well as equal spacing around the edges? We have you covered!

Reuse Flexbox Styles With A Sass Mixin

When comparing two visually similar websites, it can often be challenging to precisely identify the subtle differences between them. To facilitate a rapid analysis of these discrepancies, a practical technique involves leveraging Chrome's integrated developer tools to capture full-page screenshots of each site. Subsequently, these screenshots can be uploaded to a platform like AI Studio. There, the AI can analyze the images and generate a report detailing the variations. This entire process, leveraging a few quick shortcuts, can be completed in under a minute, delivering a comprehensive breakdown of the differences for efficient comparison and analysis.

Quickly Compare Two Sites Using AI Studio with Chrome Full Page Screenshots

It's fairly trivial to create a React project, but there's always a big hurdle between creating it locally and making it shareable so that someone else can run it. This lesson walks you through the process of automating creating a React project locally, creating the repository where it's going to be hosted, and creating shareable links where it can be run so that you can quickly and easily create single one-off demos and shoot them over to your friends and coworkers for sharing your code ideas in a working environment.


```bash
share-react-project() {
  if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: share-react-project <project_name>"
    return 1
  fi

  local project_name="$1"
  local github_username=$(gh api /user --jq '.login')

  echo "Creating Vite project: $project_name"
  pnpm create vite "$project_name" --template react

  cd "$project_name"

  echo "Initializing Git repository"
  git init

  echo "Adding all files to Git"
  git add .

  echo "Creating initial commit"
  git commit -m "Initial commit"

  local codesandbox_link="https://codesandbox.io/p/github/${github_username}/${project_name}"

  echo "Adding CodeSandbox link to README.md"
  echo "" >> README.md
  echo "## CodeSandbox" >> README.md
  echo "[![Open in CodeSandbox](https://assets.codesandbox.io/github/button-edit-blue.svg)](${codesandbox_link})" >> README.md

  echo "Adding README.md to Git"
  git add README.md

  echo "Committing README.md changes"
  git commit -m "Add CodeSandbox link"

  echo "Creating GitHub repository: $github_username/$project_name"
  gh repo create "$github_username/$project_name" --public

  echo "Pushing to remote 'origin'"
  git push -u origin main

  echo "Project '$project_name' created successfully!"
  echo "GitHub repository: https://github.com/$github_username/$project_name"
  echo "CodeSandbox link: $codesandbox_link"
}
```

Automate Creating a Local React Project, GitHub Repository, and Live Hosted Demo in a Single Command

[Verdaccio](https://verdaccio.org/) is a fully featured NPM registry that you can run locally on your machine. It’s a great tool for testing your release process, running end-to-end tests, and simulating real-world scenarios like deploying packages, installing them, and verifying functionality as an end user would.

Nx includes a [generator](https://nx.dev/features/generate-code) that simplifies setting up Verdaccio. To configure it, run:

```shell
npx nx g @nx/js:setup-verdaccio   
```

This command installs the necessary NPM packages and creates a `project.json` file with a `local-registry` target. To start the local registry, open a new terminal window and run:

```shell
npx nx local-registry
```

This will:
- Launch the Verdaccio registry.
- Configure NPM to point to the local Verdaccio server at `http://localhost:4873`.

> **Note:** A `project.json` file provides an advanced way to define scripts, offering more flexibility than a traditional `package.json` for managing complex targets.

Setup local Verdaccio server to release NPM packages

Learn how to spin up a local NPM registry powered by Verdaccio to test deploy your NPM packages.

In TypeScript, developers often begin by defining the structure of their data using type definitions or interfaces, which is a powerful way to ensure type safety. However, as applications grow and become more complex, simply defining the shape of an object might not be enough to guarantee its consistent creation and behavior throughout the codebase. This often leads to situations where objects that are intended to be of a certain "type" might be missing crucial properties or have incorrect data, which can be difficult to track down and debug.

This lesson tackles the question of when and why to move beyond basic type definitions and embrace classes in TypeScript. It demonstrates how classes provide a more robust mechanism for defining object structure, enforcing type constraints, and ensuring consistent object creation. By establishing a clear blueprint for objects, classes not only improve compile-time type safety but also offer runtime benefits and better code organization, ultimately helping developers avoid common pitfalls associated with loosely structured objects in larger TypeScript projects.

Stop Avoiding Classes in TypeScript

Karabiner isn't only for your keyboard. It can also hijack your mouse buttons and enable them to be similar to layers on your keyboard, where holding down a mouse button can allow you to tap keys on your keyboard to trigger commands and macros that can completely revolutionize your workflows. For example, you can hold down the right mouse button and tap on R to go to references in VS Code. Or hold down the right mouse button and tap the left mouse button to chop up videos and Screenflow.

This completely unlocks a whole new world of possibilities and use cases for your mouse as you can hover your mouse over anywhere on the page. And just tapping keys on your keyboard allows you to trigger mouse actions, to trigger keyboard actions, or to trigger macros and applications and terminal commands. and anything that your imagination can come up with. 

Karabiner: Rethinking Right-Click as a Macro Command Center

Make an HTML table more readable on mobile devices by using the ::before pseudo-element. We add labels to each cell, so they appear like cards when the table is viewed on smaller screens. The ::before content is set using a data-label attribute for each cell to enhance mobile viewability without horizontal scrolling.



Create a mobile friendly table with the before pseudo-element

Learn to use CSS ::before pseudo-element for mobile-friendly HTML tables. Add labels to cells for enhanced readability on mobile, avoiding horizontal scroll.

Any app of a decent size has event flows and messages being passed around. At a certain point it becomes complicated to explain it through prose and you want to turn towards diagrams. Now setting aside the time to create diagrams that accurately describe what's happening in your codebase can be quite time consuming. Luckily, with today's AI tools, we can now just do basic walkthroughs with rough recordings over codebase dictating what's going on along the way and then upload that to tools like AI Studio and then ask it to generate diagrams in a text-based format such as Mermaid that will then generate the flowcharts and diagrams for us. So this video walks us through this process of recording a rough video, uploading it to AI Studio and then asking AI Studio to generate the proper Mermaid diagram syntax.

Generate Mermaid Flow Chart Diagrams with Gemini 2.0 from Rough Screen Recordings

I'm a diehard Karabiner user and anytime I start doing something repetitively I always move it into my Karabiner configuration. Sometimes I'll fall into scenarios where I want to trigger a command, but I also want to know if that command succeeded or failed. Since Karabiner can trigger any command, setting up the command is fairly straightforward, but knowing whether it succeeded or failed became much more difficult. Luckily for me there is a package called terminal-notifier that you can install from homebrew and you can pipe the output of your command to terminal-notifier. And have a seamless way of triggering your keyboard shortcut which runs a command and you can be notified of the results.

Use Karabiner to Trigger a Terminal Command and Get Notified of the Results

There are a lot of scenarios when inspecting a site in Chrome where you don't want any click events to fire and you don't want any scripts to run. Or maybe something is animating in and out of the page and you want to capture it at a certain moment. This is a great use case for pausing script execution, which is kind of using the debugger manually by going into the Chrome DevTools and the Sources tab and clicking the pause button to essentially pause the entire page. This will give you a chance to inspect any of the elements and styles you want to inspect. And you don't have to worry about fire and click events or anything that might interrupt your investigation into the elements and styles that you want to find.

Pause Script Execution in Chrome to Easily Inspect Elements

Gemini 2.0 has a context window of a million tokens, and this means that you can upload hundreds of files and allow it to inspect and analyze massive refactors across entire code bases. 

This lesson demonstrates concatenating an entire code base into a single file and then uploading it to AI Studio. Once within AI Studio, we ask it to find the types of tasks that it can evaluate for us. Then we select one of the tasks and ask it to generate instructions for that task. Once those instructions are complete, we then turn them over to Windsurf's Cascade agent, and we allow Windsurf's Cascade to do all of the work for us as we sit back, relax, and let the AI do our jobs.

Alyssa Nicoll

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