 Courses from Jhey Tompkins

Learn how to make a fully functioning Tic Tac Toe game that doesn't need any client-side JavaScript!

For this course, we'll be using Pug and Stylus which are preprocessors for HTML and CSS respectively.

Learn how to:
- Generate markup with loops and template literals
- Leverage native HTML behavior
- Create SVG
- Use CSS variables and scope
- Implement game logic with HTML forms
- Animate SVG with CSS
- Use CSS Animation to provide motion
- Use Pug Mixins
- Disable motion when users don't want it
- Apply visual effects using CSS filter and backdrop-filter
- Generate random animations using Pug and CSS variables

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

Tic Tac Toe with CSS and SVG

Using a backdrop filter gives us a way to blur out the backdrop of an element. This is particularly useful when we want to shift the focus from the background to the foreground.

Use a Backdrop Filter to Shift Focus to the Foreground

The power of CSS variable scope and randomly generated inline CSS variables makes for some interesting opportunities. In this lesson, we take a look at how combining them can give you the ability to generate random animations.

I covered this for [CSS Tricks](https://css-tricks.com/the-power-and-fun-of-scope-with-css-custom-properties/).

Use the Combination of Scoped CSS Variables and Pug to Generate Random CSS Animations

We can use the :hover pseudo selector to conditionally style elements. In this example, we show how to do a show/hide for ghosting visual indicators on a tic tac toe board.

Use the Hover Pseudo Selector to Style Child Elements

We can use the media query `prefers-reduced-motion` to detect a user's preference for motion. This is particularly useful when we have users that may have vestibular disorders. In these cases, we can detect it and set motion speed to zero.

Use Media Queries to Detect a User Preference for Motion

Chaining CSS filters gives us the opportunity to create appealing visual effects. In this example, we look at creating a "neon" like effect for SVG.

Use Chained CSS Filter to Apply Visual Effects

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

html

If you're repeating blocks of markup or code in Pug, you can use a mixin to reduce the maintenance overhead. Here, we look at some of the ways you can use Pug mixins.

Use Pug Mixins for Reusable Blocks of Markup

If you're applying delays to animation or using open-ended keyframes, fill mode will help with getting rid of flicker. Using animation-fill-mode, we can retain styling from animation keyframes. We can retain the styling during delay periods or even when the animation has completed.

Use Animation Fill Mode to Retain Keyframe Styling

Using CSS variable scope we can stagger CSS animations to our choosing. For our Tic Tac Toe board, we want to stagger the animation of the grid lines in a way that makes it look hand drawn.

Use Scoped CSS Variables to Stagger CSS Animations

Use CSS variables to take the responsibility of coloring SVG away from the markup in this example. Instead of an inline stroke, we can use scoped CSS variables to color the stroke for SVG elements.

Use CSS Variable Scope to Color SVG Elements

Using stroke-dashoffset and stroke-dasharray, we're able to make SVG strokes look as if they are drawn using CSS animation.

Use CSS Animation to Draw SVG

We can use SVG to create a cross with one path. But, what if want to animate a cross as if it's being hand-drawn? We can do this by defining more than one path for our SVG.

Use SVG to Create an Animatable Cross

Use the circle element in SVG to define a radius and center points for a circle.

Use SVG to Create a Circle

In combination with scoped CSS variables, we can use chained CSS transforms to position elements. In this example, we lay out the lines for a Tic Tac Toe board.

Use Chained CSS Transforms to Position Elements

Use SVG to create lines with the path element. We can hand-code a path definition and set a stroke width and stroke linecap. We can adjust the path definition to accommodate for the SVG viewBox.

Use SVG to Create Lines

We can use selector combinations with the general sibling combinator to optionally show/hide elements using CSS. In this example, we look at detecting winning combinations for a Tic Tac Toe board.

Use Selector Combinations to Optionally Display Elements

The sibling combinators are a neat way to select elements that are siblings or descendants of siblings to checkboxes. It provides a way to show and hide elements without the need for JavaScript.

Use the Adjacent Sibling Combinator to Optionally Display Elements

By generating inline CSS variables with a markup preprocessor like Pug, we're able to generate CSS variables for positioning based on a loop index.

Use Inline CSS Variables to Position Elements

It's the "Checkbox" hack! This is the key to how we can do things like making CSS toggles. Here, we look at using the :checked pseudo selector with the general sibling combinator to flip the turns of a Tic Tac Toe game.

Use Checkboxes to Optionally Display Elements

Use display with the value grid to lay out items in a grid. You can specify the number of columns and rows using grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows.



Use Display Grid To Lay Out Elements

You can use an element with the type "reset" within a form to reset a form on click. It's particularly useful when we don't want users to refresh a page in order to get back to an initial state.

Use Type Reset to Reset Form State

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.

Jhey Tompkins

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