 Courses from Jeff Roberts

Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

There are numerous ways to sort slices in Go.

In this lesson, we will take a quick look at an easy way to sort a slice of structs or primitives. We will learn about using one of the handy built-in functions in Go's sort package called *sort.Slice*. This function takes a slice to sort as an argument and a *less function* or *less func* for short as the second argument. You will write this *less function* to sort the slice however you wish.

Go's sort.Slice function looks like this: *sort.Slice(someSlice, func(i, j int) bool)*. It's super-easy to write an anonymous *less function* to sort.

As you will see, it's easy to use this *less function* to do simple and even complex sorts of your structs with minimal effort.

Sort Slices of Structs using Go sort.Slice

There are numerous ways to sort slices in Go.

The simplest way uses some basic built-in functions from Go's **sort** package to allow you to easily sort slices of primitives, that being **Strings**, **Ints** and **Float64s**. Using these sort functions, we don't have control over the sort order as the data will be sorted in ascending alphabetical (for strings) or ascending numerical (for Ints and Float64s) order.

In this lesson, we will take a quick look at the easiest way to sort slices of primitives. We will learn about using some of the handy built-in functions in Go's sort package, including:

* sort.Strings: Sorting a slice of strings
* sort.Ints: Sorting a slice of ints
* sort.Float64s: Sorting a slice of float64s

Sort Primitives (strings, ints, and floats) in Go 

This collection of lessons will cover a variety of topics that teach you how to work with slices and arrays in go. You'll learn how to declare them, create them using literal syntax, iterate over them, add to them, remove from them and other useful things.

Learn about slices and arrays in Go

Go has a special indexing syntax that forms the basis of removing one or more elements from a slice. I will teach you this syntax and show you its various forms.

Based upon that, I'll show you how to remove a single element from a slice. However, you may find this somewhat limiting. I also will show you a more typical example of removing elements from a slice as we iterate over it. This technique shows you how to remove multiple elements from a slice.

Remove Elements from a slice in Go

There are a couple of different ways to iterate over an array or slice in Go. The primary approach is to use range, which handles the iteration for you. However, you can also use a traditional for loop if you need to do something out of the ordinary, like iterating in reverse or skipping every other element.

Iterate over an Array or Slice in Go

There is a built-in append function that is used to append elements to a slice. We'll see in this lesson that the append function works only with slices, not arrays. There are also some nifty alternate uses of the the append function that make appending super easy.

Checkout the sample code in my [github repo](https://github.com/JeffBNimble/GoLessons/tree/master/Array-Add).

Append Elements to a Slice in Go

There are numerous ways that you can declare and create arrays and slices in Go. This lesson will show you several and I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of one over another. After watching, you will better understand all of the possible ways you can declare/create as well as the idiomatic way.

These include:

* var
* the built-in function *new*
* the built-in function *make*
* Array and Slice literals

While it is not the main intent of this lesson, I do touch on some of the differences between slices and arrays.

Checkout the code in my [github repo](https://github.com/JeffBNimble/GoLessons/tree/master/Array-Declare).

Declare Arrays and Slices in Go

Golang has no built-in function(s) to filter an array. This lesson will teach you two different ways to filter.

The first is to create a separate array and add the filtered elements to it. This works great, but doesn't use memory as efficiently as the second way.

The second way shows you how to filter by altering the original array in place without making another array to hold the filtered elements. But, it has a side-effect that I'll tell you about which may help you decide which approach you will use to filter your array. 

Filter an Array in Go

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.

Jeff Roberts

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