Learn Algolia, Android and Chrome-devtools

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Frontend runtime optimization is heavily impacted by rendering.  Understanding the way the JS engine and the browser work is crucial for optimizing applications and understading how to avoid performance pitfalls.
This collection explains about the Critical Rendering Path, performance bottlenecks and practical solutions.

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.

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Critical Rendering Path

Chrome DevTools are incredibly useful for a frontend developer, sometimes we spend more time using them than our text editor of choice.

That's why it's so important to understand this tool better - those quick lessons will teach you things that will help you to become a more effective developer.

You will learn how to:

- **Use (experimental) CSS Overview to learn all about CSS used on a page in a minute**
- **Style console.log messages with CSS** - a _crucial_ skill for any senior developer (j/k)
- **Debug your code (on production and local environment) with logpoints**
- **Run a Lighthouse audit of your site**
- **Choose accessible colors for your website that have an AAA contrast ratio rating**
- **Force a DOM element state in Chrome DevTools**
- **Use Console utilities to make debugging easier**
- **Copy a network request as fetch or cURL with Chrome DevTools**

Have fun!

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

chrome-devtools

Chrome DevTools tips & tricks

A lot of the time, web apps are built primarily with the desktop layout in consideration, and the mobile layout suffers as a result. In this course we are going to discuss using features of user interface which are optimised for mobile devices.

We are going to discuss CSS features that make a big difference and build entire components that work great on mobile devices and browsers. We are going to take into account browser support to ensure our users are getting the experience we want them to.

More and more of our users depend on their mobile device to use our web apps. With this in mind, we are going to look at how to optimise the components we build for smaller viewports, and how to ensure our customer gets an optimised version of our web app for their device.

We are going to discuss different ways we can view, test, and debug our web app in a mobile setting so that we know what we are seeing is what our user is seeing, because sometimes a desktop browser emulating a mobile device just isn’t enough.


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

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Optimize User Experience for Mobile Devices and Browsers

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 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

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

If you are developing JavaScript applications you are likely using logging as an integral part of your development process. Did you know that you aren't limited to simple `console.log` statements? Modern browsers give you a lot more logging options to work with!

This course will explore those options and give you some new logging tools for your professional toolbox.

Advanced Logging with the JavaScript Console

Miscellaneous one-off lessons on debugging, productivity hacks, and JavaScript tricks.

Tips and Tricks

This is a small collection of videos to help you get familiar with Chrome browser's performance oriented developer tools.
In this collection, learn how to record a performance profile, tweak the settings to get the most relevant profile and finally a look into the different sections of the performance data visualisation.

Basics of Chrome's Performance Devtools

Anything related to JavaScript performance

Javascript Performance

Open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, TypeScript or JavaScript.

nativescript

We will learn how to add an Android library to our project and translate it’s Java api to NativeScript. For this lesson, we will look at [Filestack’s Android SDK](https://github.com/filestack/filepicker-android) built with Gradle. Specifically, we will cover how to immediately start working with the library even when a [NativeScript](/q/nativescript) plugin does not exist for it.

Use an Android library in NativeScript for Angular using Java apis

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

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