 Courses from Mykola Bilokonsky

Bite-size video tutorials for badass web developers.

egghead

A lot of characters have been spent talking about "engineering time" or about how to manage "engineering personalities", and many engineers may wryly chuckle at the archetype.

But advances in our understanding of neurodiversity mean it's time to look again at things like Autism, ADHD and other conditions that impact millions of undiagnosed people in various and often subtle ways.

Are you running on "Engineering Time" - or are you an undiagnosed neurodivergent person, likely with a number of unmet needs? Let's talk about it!

Check out the [community notes for the course](https://github.com/eggheadio/eggheadio-course-notes/tree/master/egghead-talks-things-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-neurodiversity).

Things You Should Know About Neurodiversity 

The Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools for short), are a set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.

chrome-devtools

Learn to use the Style panel within the Element Inspector to examine and tweak the CSS rules applied to your application as it runs. 

Chrome Devtools: Elements - Debug with Style!

Learn how to use the Inspect Elements panel in Chrome DevTools and how it differs from viewing the source of the HTML you're looking at. 

Chrome Devtools: Elements - Inspect Elements vs View Source

Learn how to use the Elements panel in chrome devtools to make structural changes to the DOM as it runs - you can explore what your site would look like with different elements and attribute values, all without polluting your source code.

Chrome Devtools: Elements - Make Changes in Your Browser

There are a variety of ways to trigger the javascript debugger. Use the elements panel to set breakpoints on DOM elements so that you can hit the debugger whenever an element’s children or attributes change, or when it’s removed.

Use DOM Break Points

The Element Inspector in Chrome DevTools offers powerful integration with the console - learn how to programmatically navigate your selected element, how to search through the history and use CSS selectors to control what you're looking at and how to quickly and easily listen for events as you debug your application.

Chrome Devtools: Elements - Console Integration

Use the Event Listeners tab within the Elements panel to list all DOM Event listeners. This is useful to understand how and why your site is reacting to various forms of input.

Understand the Event Listeners Panel

The Elements panel includes a tool to show you how your site will look across a variety of devices. This can be tremendously helpful when troubleshooting layout issues on specific hardware that you don’t have access to, as well as general-purpose response design. You can mock different screen resolutions and behaviors to help put you into your users’ shoes.

Use the Device Toolbar to Emulate Different Screens

In this course we’ll take a deep look at the Elements panel in the chrome devtools. We’ll step through each button and tab on this panel and discuss how to use them to interact with your web application as it runs.

Debug the DOM in Chrome with the Devtools Elements Panel

This course will examine the Network panel in Chrome DevTools. We’ll step through the request log, examining the various properties exposed. We’ll talk about timing, filtering, throttling and generally using the network panel to better understand the ways in which our applications exist within a connected context.

Debug HTTP with Chrome DevTools Network Panel

Most of today’s websites use optimized, compiled, minified and obfuscated javascript and CSS. Examining this stuff here has some severely limited utility, which is why when developing we rely on sourcemaps. We’ll set up a webpack workflow that uses sourcemaps to show you how they can help your debugging!

Unbundle your JavaScript with Source Maps in Chrome DevTools

Using the Snippets tab in the source devtool you can define and run arbitrary pieces of code in your browser against whatever website you’re looking at. This is a great way to store commonly used pieces of code that you rely on for debugging or customization.

Use Snippets to Store Behaviors in Chrome DevTools

There are a variety of ways to trigger the debugger in Chrome's DevTools. You can set breakpoints on line numbers, break on XHR requests or DOM changes, break on specific events or even manually break by using the special `debugger` keyword in your code.

Set Breakpoints for the Chrome Debugger

Use the Chrome Debugger to pause execution of your application as it runs to see what’s happening in slow-motion. The debugger is an advanced tool that allows you to examine every change that happens in your application so that you can understand how and why your application state evolves over time.

Examine a Running App with the Chrome Debugger

Use the source navigator to browse through the various resources that your site has loaded from remote servers through the course of its session. Stylesheets, JavaScript files, media attachments and anything else that was requested as a part of your application’s lifecycle shows up here, and you can examine these resources in the context of your running app to see what exactly you’re rendering. 

Examine a Page's Source Resources with Chrome DevTools

This course examines the Sources panel in the Chrome DevTools, which allows you to see what files are responsible for the various things on the screen. Bundled into this panel, though, is the single most useful tool for any JavaScript developer - the JavaScript Debugger. We’ll use the Debugger to inspect JavaScript as it runs, allowing you to watch (and even interact with) the state of your application as it runs in ways that’ll blow your mind if you’ve mostly used console.log to debug your applications to this point. 

Debug JavaScript in Chrome with DevTool Sources

Anyone who’s been around the net long enough has seen various HTTP error codes - things like “404 file not found!” or “500 internal server error”. But what are these, exactly? Let’s use the Network DevTool to better understand them. Learn the four major types of HTTP status code, and how to use the Network panel to inspect failed HTTP Requests.

Understand HTTP Status Codes with the Chrome Devtools 

Use the Overview tool in the Network devtool to see requests over time, and to constrain the tool to a given window of time so that you can focus on a subset of traffic.

Analyze Overall Network Traffic Using Overview Tool in Chrome Devtools

Often when we’re developing we’re serving our content directly from our local machines, meaning that our network performance is incredibly fast. In production, though, conditions are often much less reliable. To replicate production conditions for testing and debugging it can be useful to throttle our local network speeds - you can do that here.

Test Slow Network Performance with the Chrome Devtools

A large enough project will frequently flood the network devtool with content. Use the filter tool to restrict which HTTP requests you’re inspecting so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

Filter Requests in the Network Panel in Chrome Devtools

To understand the Network DevTool, you have to understand what HTTP is and how it works. Let’s use the Network DevTool to inspect an HTTP request and its corresponding response so that we can understand what the browser is doing.

Analyze HTTP Requests and Responses with Chrome Devtools

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.

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