 Courses from Lukas Ruebbelke

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful expansive cloud infrastructure platform for building modern web applications.

AWS provides services for data, presentation, authentication, security, video encoding, and much more. Offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally, AWS powers a large percentage of the internet.

You already know enough. You just need a deeper understanding of what you already know You've had a mental model of a function ever since you understood cause and effect. Input and output. 

And now that you've formed the connections between local functions and Lambda functions, a new world of endless possibilities has been unlocked. 

With Serverless + AWS, what would once take weeks, now takes hours. 

Worse than tightly coupled code is when you are coupled to beliefs that limit what you see as possible for you to accomplish. Decouple your expectations from that perception and realize that you are free to build apps faster, cheaper, easier, and better than before.

**You can go further.**

Course Outro: Taking AWS Further

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Step functions are a chain of functions where each function consumes the output of the previous function as its input. 

If you understand functions, then you understand Lambda functions. If you understand Lambda functions, then you know how to create Lambda step functions. 

With this in mind, you will learn how to chain together your Lambda functions, without writing a single line of code, by designing the workflow visually within the AWS console.

Create Lambda Step Functions in the AWS Console

In this lesson you will learn how to configure your Serverless function to store a PDF on AWS S3. 

You will learn how to set up your serverless.yml config with an environment, and IAM role options you need to put objects into an S3 Bucket. 

And in addition to the AWS stuff, you will learn how to programmatically create PDFs using the `pdfkit` package and functional programming patterns.

Generate a PDF From a Lambda Function and Store It on AWS S3

Even webpages can be scraped using serverless functions! 

We can create a function using the Serverless CLI and import Axios and Cheerio. Axios is used to get the HTML from a page and then we use Cheerio to parse the HTML for our desired data and create an array of pretty printed strings from it.

Scrape a Webpage with a Serverless Function

Using serverless functions with webhooks is a commonly used modern frontend pattern. It makes integrating with services flexible and straightforward. 

In this lesson we will set up a webhook in Zapier that sends a `task` in the request body over to Google Sheets and creates a row in a spreadsheet. 

Then we will create a Lambda function that you can make a POST request to with a task in the body of the request. Once the request is made the task is parsed out of the body and posted to our Zapier URL, triggering the webhook.

Trigger a Custom Webhook with a Serverless Function

Mock APIs are useful for development when you can't use live data for whatever reason. 

Faker makes creating mock APIs a straightforward process. In this lesson you'll see how to user Faker to create a generator object for each of a User's properties. Then we'll write a function that goes through each property and run a generate function. 

Once we've created our mock API generator, we can use the Serverless framework to generate a Lambda Function and API Gateway so we can access our mock API from a live URL.

Create a Mock API Endpoint Using Faker and Serverless

You can create endpoints without drastically changing your function writing workflow by using the Serverless framework. 

With Serverless you can generate a new handler function from the command line. Then, you can change the configuration, write your function, and deploy it to AWS.

Deploy an AWS Lambda Function with the Serverless Framework

AWS makes setting up an endpoint straightforward.

In this lesson, you will learn how to create an AWS Lambda function that returns JSON data, and then use API Gateway to set up an endpoint with a public URL.

Create an Endpoint With AWS Lambda and API Gateway

Front-end web architecture has made exciting advances in recent years. But before we get to that we need to have a discussion on what has led us to this point and the driving principles behind it. 

In this video, you will learn about coupling, and see how decoupling has driven developments in front-end architecture. And, you will gain an understanding of the parallels between front-end architecture and cloud architecture.

How Decoupling Has Driven Frontend Architecture

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Manually creating action items every time we need to dispatch an action eventually accumulates to a very tedious process. In this lesson, we will learn how to abstract out the creation of action items so that we consolidate their creation into a single place. This not only creates efficiencies in how we express code but also reduces code volume while simultaneously increasing stability. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Create Reusable Actions with Action Creators

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to enable our store to work with more than one reducer in an application.

Currently, we have set up our store to work with the categories reducer exclusively, but this leaves us with a real problem, what if we want to keep track of the currently selected category within our store so that we can access that data somewhere else in the app? It is safe to say that most applications consist of many data models interacting together, and we need a way to accommodate this within the single state tree in our application.

When we initialize our app store, wouldn't it be convenient if we could take all of our reducers and combine them into one big reducer that our store knows how to work with? Well, this is exactly what the combine reducer method does in Redux. It allows us to combine reducers together and then access them as a named property on our application store.

We currently have a category reducer just hanging out here doing nothing because we have been focusing entirely on the categories reducer. We are going to combine the two reducers so that we can use the current category data within our bookmarks component.

Angular 1.x Redux: Handle Multiple Models by Combining Reducers

Invariably the question that comes up when talking about Redux is how does one handle asynchronous operations in redux. For instance, how do we hand off an operation to redux that requires a remote call to the server? Where exactly does the async part get handled? 

Redux has this concept of middleware that allows us to insert custom logic in the space between dispatching an action, and the moment it reaches the reducer. In this lesson, we are going to set up a few async operations and then use redux thunk middleware to make sure that everything makes it into the reducer properly.

The main key to thunk middleware is that it allows us to return a function instead of an action. This function can encapsulate the async operation and dispatches the appropriate action when the operation is completed.

Angular 1.x Redux: Handle Asynchronous Operations with Middleware

One of the primary advantages of using redux is that reducers are incredibly easy to test. By nature, they have a clearly defined contract of inputs and outputs, and because they are stateless, they require very little instrumentation to test in isolation. 

We will start with a few simple tests for the categories reducer and then move on to testing the CRUD functionality within the bookmarks reducer. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Test Reducers

Up to this point, we have created an effective, yet rudimentary, implementation of Redux by manually creating an application store, reducers and action creators. We have already made significant progress in simplifying state management within our application, but we have in fact only touched the surface of what Redux has to offer.

In this lesson, we are going to introduce ngRedux into our application and let it handle the rest of the heavy lifting as we work through this series. ngRedux is a project that provides angular bindings to redux to streamline integrating it into our application.

Angular 1.x Redux: Integrate ngRedux

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to integrate Redux Devtools into our Angular application.

Redux Devtools is a live-editing time travel environment for Redux. Devtools boasts a list of awesome features but my two favorite ones are that we can inspect every state and action as it happens and we can go back in time by “cancelling” actions.

This is going to be an interesting lesson because, in order for this to work, we are going to need to make something that was written for React work in Angular. For the most part, everything will play side by side with one small trick that we will pull off at the end to force an Angular digest cycle when React manipulates the application store. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Integrate Redux Devtools

One of the biggest mental shifts that developers have to take when embracing redux is shifting from mutable operations to immutable operations. The problem with mutable operations is that they create side effects that involve anything else that is referencing the thing that is being mutated.

With immutable operations within a reducer, a new object is returned for every operation – completely bypassing the possibility that an existing reference is going to be compromised. It is then up to the consumer to decide how they want to get the new data and what to do with it.

In this lesson, we are going to flesh out the CRUD functionality of our bookmarks reducer, doing it first using mutable operations and then refactoring it to use immutable operations.

Angular 1.x Redux: Avoid State Mutation with Immutable Operations

In this lesson, we are going are going to apply everything that we have learned by building out our bookmarks component to be powered by Redux. This will help reinforce all the techniques we have covered by seeing them built out  in a single, contiguous lesson.

We will walk through the steps necessary to phase out the bookmarks model with a Redux implementation that includes building and integrating the equivalent reducers and action creators to integrate into our application.

Angular 1.x Redux: Put It All Together

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to map our Angular component directly to our application store using the connect method on ngRedux. 

In Angular, it is a common technique to bind a controller property directly to the model so that our controllers remain lightweight and operate more as a pass through mechanism than anything else.

Using the connect method, we can accomplish the same effect by not only binding properties directly to the application store, but also binding our controller to our action creators. This allows us to drastically simplify our controllers as we are able to delete a bunch of local controller methods as they become unnecessary because of our mappings.

Angular 1.x Redux: Map State and Dispatchers to Redux

In this lesson, we are going to extend our application store with a subscribe method so that we do not have to manually query our application store every time we dispatch an action.

In our categories controller, we are dispatching a **GET_CATEGORIES** action every time we want to update the categories collection within our application store. For this change to be propagated back into our controller, we need to call **store.getState**. 

Depending on how many times we are calling **store.dispatch**, this could get very cumbersome. We will extend our application by adding a subscribe method so that state changes are automatically pushed into our controller.

Angular 1.x Redux: Subscribe to the Application Store

In this lesson, we are are going to learn how to abstract out state mutations into a reducer. In our current Eggly application, all of the state and business logic for our categories is handled within the categories model. We are going to refactor our code to entirely eliminate the need for our categories model by building out a couple of reducers and seeing how we can interact with them directly. 
The key thing to notice as we build out our reducers is that a reducer itself is completely stateless because it receives current state every single time it needs to calculate and return the new state. With a clearly defined contract of inputs and outputs, this makes testing reducers really easy which is one of the huge benefits of using this approach. 

Angular 1.x Redux: Handle State Mutations with Reducers

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to build an application store so that we can have a single place to store our application state. Reducers are great for updating state because they are stateless, but they are very bad at preserving state, which is vital when you need to reference state in more than one place.

We will build out a simple application store that will be responsible for keeping track of our categories collection that our categories controller can consume.

Angular 1.x Redux: Persist State with an Application Store

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.

Lukas Ruebbelke

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