 Courses from Steven Mercatante

Gatsby is a blazing fast static site generator built with React. Gatsby gives you all of the modern JavaScript tools you want; set up and ready to go out of the box.

gatsby

Learn how to add custom JavaScript to your Gatsby's main HTML.

Inject Custom JavaScript Into a Gatsby Site

It's useful being able to control when your Gatsby posts are published, but Gatsby doesn't give you that ability out of the box. Learn how to add a `published` field to your posts so you can control their visibility. 

Add a Published Field to Your Gatsby Posts to Control Their Visibility

We can pass custom data to our Gatsby pages by overriding the `onCreatePage` function and using its `context` object. This is really useful when you want to provide custom data to GraphQL queries, or your page components.

Pass Custom Data to Gatsby Pages

Visual Studio Code is an integrated development environment (IDE) built and maintained by Microsoft. It is offered free of charge.

vscode

VS Code Extensions

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

Managing form state in React is so much easier with hooks. Learn how to manage a login form's state using the `useState` hook.

Manage form state with React hooks

Form validation in React can be tricky, but it doesn't need to be! In this lesson I'll show you how to add client-side validation to your React forms using the `yup` library.

Add client-side validation to your React forms

VSCode gives us plenty of options for navigating and editing our code without needing to leave the keyboard. Learn these commands to speed up your day-to-day work.

Navigate Code like a Pro in VSCode

The VSCode Dimmer extension is great when you want to show and explain code to someone. It helpfully dims the code that's not relevant to the selected line, making it easier for your audience to focus on what you want them to.

Use VSCode Dimmer to Highlight Code when Teaching

The Turbo Console Log extension lets us quickly add console.log statements with additional data, which makes debugging your code easier.

Make Console Logging in VS Code 10x Easier with Turbo Console Log

The better-comments extension lets us specify different types of comments and color them accordingly. This lets you add semantic meaning to your comments, for example: you can mark some comments as TODO, and others as important, or as questions. You can also define your own custom types of comments.

Write Better Comments in VS Code

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

Figuring out the singular and plural versions of words is a piece of cake when you use the inflection library. Stop wasting time wondering how to write a function that pluralizes words like mouse or cactus. And learn how the ordinalize function easily adds the correct suffix to numbers.

Singularize, Pluralize and Ordinalize English Words in JavaScript

You already know that Apollo Client can manage your remote data and state from a GraphQL server, but did you know that you can also use it to manage local state in your React apps? You can! 

`apollo-link-state` lets you query and mutate local state the same as you would a GraphQL server. This means that you don't need to add _another_ dependency like Redux or MobX to your app. 

Managing your remote and local state using the same interface results in a codebase that's easier to maintain and reason about.

Manage local state in React using GraphQL and Apollo Client.

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications.

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

elixir

The pipe operator is an easy to use and powerful feature of Elixir. It takes the output from the expression on the left, and automatically passes it as the first argument to the function on the right. This is especially useful when chaining together multiple function calls or data transformations. Using the pipe operator results in code that's easier to read, write and refactor.

Chain Function Calls with the Pipe Operator in Elixir

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.

Steven Mercatante

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