 Courses from Shane Osbourne

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

When dealing with Components, there’s often the need to either have some local state controlled by the component (such as form input fields) or to tap into the lifecycle events of the component. In this lesson we’ll give some practical examples of both.


Define Stateful Components in Preact

Storing and updating values inside a component’s local state (known as controlled components) is such a common pattern that Preact offers a really handy feature called ‘link state’ that not only removes the need to bind class methods, but also handles the setting of new values. This can remove the need for ‘setter’ style methods on classes and in this lesson we’ll look at an example of tracking the value of a ‘text input’

Use Link State to Automatically Handle State Changes

Some applications only need a very minimal routing solution. This lesson will cover a practical example showing the router in use. We’ll build a simple search feature that accepts user input and then calls the github API. We’ll see how to access route parameters, how to manually & automatically navigate around, and finally how to handle un-matched path. https://github.com/developit/preact-router

Handle Simple Routing with preact-router

React-router is the community favourite routing solution - it can handle all of your complex routing needs and in this lesson we’ll cover what’s needed to enable it’s use within Preact. https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router

Integrate react-router with Preact

Redux is one of the most popular state-management libraries and although not specific to React, it is widely used with it. This is why the author of Preact has released a package called preact-redux, which is a simple wrapper around the main react-redux package that enables it to be used in a Preact application without any other changes to your codebase. In this lesson we refactor a stateful component to use Redux + Redux-thunk. https://github.com/developit/preact-redux

Integrate Redux with Preact

Preact and Redux is a great combination, made even more so by the amazing dev tools extension that can be installed into both Chrome and Firefox. In this lesson we’ll see how to enable it and how it works seamlessly with Preact.
https://github.com/zalmoxisus/redux-devtools-extension#12-advanced-store-setup

Use Redux Dev-Tools with Preact

In this lesson we will create a ‘webpack.config.js’ file from scratch. Along the way we’ll learn about the entry point, how to specify output, how to configure loaders, the Preact-specific parts of the Babel configuration, and finally how to use the ‘webpack-dev-server’ via a script in the ‘package.json’ file

Configure Webpack 2 and Babel for use with Preact

Many components within an application can be rendered using only data that is ‘passed’ to them by a parent. We call these “Functional Components” as they do not contain any internal state. In this lesson we look at how to define these types of components and how to pass data to them.

Define Functional Components in Preact

Preact offers, in addition to the regular component API from React, the ability to access both props & state as function parameters to the render method. This lesson will cover an example of how to utilize this convenience along with how destructuring can make it even nicer to work with.

Use State and Props in the Component Render Function

Not every app is greenfield, and it would be a shame if existing React apps could not benefit from the micro-size of Preact. In this lesson we’ll discuss what preact-compat is, how to use it, and some examples of the file-size savings available. https://github.com/developit/preact-compat

 Reduce the Size of a React App in Two Lines with preact-compat

Although technically you can run Preact without any tools or pre-compiling, we’ll get a much better development experience by using modern versions of Javascript along with JSX. To achieve this, we'll be installing `babel-core` along with [`babel-preset-env`](https://egghead.io/lessons/node-js-use-babel-preset-env-with-native-node-features-and-also-use-babel-plugins). This combination will provide us with a set of plugins suitable for transpiling our code for use in modern browsers. It doesn't include support for JSX however, so we'll add the `babel-plugin-transform-react-jsx` plugin to handle that part. Along with creating a Javascript file that can be executed in the browser, we also want to preview our work each time we change a file - so we install [Webpack](https://egghead.io/playlists/learning-webpack) and the Webpack Dev Server to handle both of those tasks. The final dependency we install is `babel-loader` which will allow the source files being accessed by Webpack to first be processed by Babel and the plugins we specified.

Install Development Tools for Preact

By creating a simple ‘hello world’ example application first in vanilla Javascript, and then in Preact without any tools, we’ll learn what type of problems Preact is solving for us and how is works at a low level. Then we’ll switch to a Webpack + Babel setup  we’ll cover some fundamental concepts such as, which imports we need, how to create a component, how to use JSX and finally how to render our component into a target element in a web page.

Create a Hello World App with Preact

In this course we will begin with nothing more than an empty directory & a text editor. Through small, focussed lessons we’ll learn how to setup our app with Webpack & Babel and how to configure these tools for use with Preact. Then we’ll move on to learning how to create components and how the Preact API mirrors that of React - highlighting the differences/additions along the way. Finally we’ll look at the interoperability with existing popular libraries in the React community such as Redux & React Router and with the popular development tools such as Redux Dev Tools & React Dev-Tools

Up and running with Preact

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

Array reduce is used to accumulate a new value by applying a function that you provide to each item in your source array. Reduce behaves differently based on whether or not you provide an initial value - we cover this in depth in this lesson and provide some practical use cases.

Produce a single value from an Array with reduce

Immutable.js provides many Persistent Immutable data structures including: List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record.

immutable

The key to being productive with Immutable JS is understanding how to update values that are nested. Using `setIn` you can place a new value directly into an existing or new path. If you need access to the previous value before setting the new one, you can use `updateIn` instead. `updateIn`  accepts the same path lookups as `setIn`, but gives you a callback function instead so that you can use the previous value however you wish and return an updated version.

Updating nested values with ImmutableJS

The `every` method returns true or false based on whether or not every item in the array passes the condition you provide in a callback function. In this lesson we look at some practical examples for simple validation, inferring state from data and for re-using the logic in our callbacks with array filters. 

Validate Data with the Every() Method

A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras.

lodash

Property access in Javascript can be problematic - especially when dealing with nested Objects and Arrays. Doing it manually and in a safe manner requires tons of boilerplate inside conditionals and results in a defensive style of coding. In this lesson we look at why this is a problem & how to overcome it using the `get` method from the popular utility library `Lodash`

Safer property access with Lodash's 'get' method

Map is one of the most useful array methods. It creates a new array with the exact same number of items as the source and can be used to modify values, change their type, add fields to objects, simplify objects etc. In this lesson we focus on practical use-cases for map & see it in conjunction with other array methods.

Modify Values in an Array with Map

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

typescript

It's common in Javascript for functions to accept different argument types and to also return different types. In this lesson we learn how to 'teach' Typescript about these dynamic functions so that we can still benefit from the powerful static type analysis.

Function Overloads in Typescript

RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences. 


rxjs

Libraries such as RxJS use generics heavily in their definition files to describe how types flow through different interfaces and function calls. We can provide our own type information when we create Observables to enable all of the auto-complete & type-safety features that you would expect from Typescript. This can be achieved with minimal annotations thanks to the power of generics.

Understanding Generics with RxJS

If Typescript is the first language in which you've encountered generics, the concept can be quite difficult to understand. We skip the lecture in this lesson and dive straight into a real-world use-case that is guaranteed to help you understand the need for generics.

Introduction to Generics in Typescript

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.

Shane Osbourne

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