Learn Discord, Nginx and Webpack

We can use the Discord API to build bots, integrations, and extensions for the platform.

discord

The final step we need to take is to deploy our Discord bot to production. We'll be using using GitHub and Railway.app. 

[Railway.app](https://railway.app/) is a deployment platform that allows us to deploy our bot to the cloud. They give you $5 or 500 hours of free usage per month, which probably won't last you the full month, but it's a great way to get started.

Deploy a Discord.js Bot for Production

Disabling buttons can be useful in Discord servers to prevent users from clicking on buttons that are no longer relevant. By disabling a button, you can inform users why the button is no longer clickable and avoid confusion or frustration.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to create a button that will disable itself when a submissions for a book-club have closed.

Conditionally Disable a Custom Discord Button

Now, let's learn how to add roles to users in a Discord server using a Discord.js collector.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to create a collector to gather users who click on a specific button, filter out users who do not have a certain role, and add a specific role to the users who meet the filter criteria.

Add Roles to Users using a Discord.js Collector

Let's now learn how to create dynamic channels and roles with our Discord bot.

We want to be able to create new roles and channels for the book clubs and their attendants that we create in our server.

We'll be using methods from the `interaction` object to create the role and channel. And, we'll make sure to create both the role and channel each with the correct permissions.

Create Dynamic Channels and Roles with a Discord Bot

In this lesson, you will learn how to create custom buttons in Discord.js using `ActionRowBuilder` and `ButtonBuilder`. You will also learn how to style and add text to the button using `ButtonStyle` and the `setEmoji` method.

We'll need to make these buttons for our book-club message to give users the ability to let us know that they want to be a part of the club. 

`ActionRowBuilder` and `ButtonBuilder` are important, here's what they do:

`ActionRowBuilder` is used to create a row of buttons or other action components in a Discord message. This class provides methods for adding buttons, text, and other components to the row, as well as methods for formatting the row.

`ButtonBuilder` is used to create individual buttons within the `ActionRowBuilder`. This class provides methods for setting the text, emoji, style, and other properties of the button.

By using them both, we are able to create a row of buttons exactly how we want them to look!

Create Custom Discord Buttons with ActionRowBuilder and ButtonBuilder

In this lesson, you will be learning how to display relative time in a Discord embedded message using the Unix timestamp. 

We'll be adding a countdown timer to an embedded message to show the time remaining until submissions to a book-club close.

By the end of this lesson, you will have the ability to convert hours into seconds, add it to the current time in the Unix timestamp, and create a variable to store the wait time in seconds to display the short date time and relative time in Discord.

Display Relative Time in a Discord Embedded Message

Let's convert our Discord bot to respond with embedded messages.

Embedded messages in Discord are a great way to make your bot's responses look a lot more visually appealing!

We'll create a new command called `/bookclub` that will take in a book title, an author, and the number of hours until the submission deadline from the user. Then, it will `reply` with an object that Discord will automatically convert into an embedded message.

Have a Discord Bot Respond with Embedded Messages

In this lesson, you will learn how to build custom commands that can receive user input.

As a Discord user, you may have noticed that many servers use custom commands to provide information, moderate the chat, or enhance the overall user experience. By learning how to build these custom commands, you'll be able to create a more interactive and dynamic Discord server for your community!

We'll start by introducing the basics of slash commands and how they can be used in a Discord app. You'll then learn how to create a simple command that sends a response back to the user who triggered the command. 

We'll also cover how to make your commands more dynamic by adding arguments.

By the end of the lesson, you'll understand how to receive and respond to input from users and be able to build more sophisticated bots that can interact with your users in meaningful ways.

Receive and Respond to Input From Users with Discord.js Slash Commands

Now that our files are set up, we can now write our first Discord.js slash command.

By create custom commands, we extend the functionality of our Discord bot and can make it much more fun and interesting. 

We'll start by creating a new file in the commands folder, importing the slash command builder, and defining the data and execute sections of the command. We'll then register the command and test it in the Discord application.

By the end of this lesson, you'll have a solid understanding of how to create custom slash commands in Discord.js. So get ready to dive in and start building!

Create Your First Discord.js Slash Command

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

In this lesson, you will be setting up the necessary files for your first Discord.js slash command. The goal of this lesson is to give you a solid foundation to build upon as you create your own custom commands for Discord.

We will be importing and using `fs` and `path` to read from the command and events directories, using `Collection` from Discord to store and retrieve your commands, and creating the `Client` using the `GatewayIntentBits. 

Also, we are going to deploy your commands and set up events to execute them properly once they're written.

Setup for Discord.js Slash Commands

Using the Discord.js library, we're going to send our first message command! 

Let's create a classic "hello world" message command and learn how to create a new client instance, enable the necessary gateway intents, listen for specific events, and respond to those events by accessing a "message object" and then sending a message back.

Create your first Discord.js Bot Message Command

Now that we've set up a bot on our Discord server, let's write some code to get it do some fun stuff.

We're going to set up a new project and use the `Discord.js` library. While setting up this project you'll learn how to properly configure the client and log in to your bot by passing a Discord API token to `client.login`.

Once the project is set up we'll send our first event using the `client.once` and event, and set up some scripts so that we can start the bot using yarn.

Throughout the lesson, you will be introduced to important concepts and best practices for building Discord bots. By the end of the lesson, you will have a basic understanding of how to create a simple bot and be ready to continue building

Send your first Discord.js Bot Event 

In this lesson, you'll learn how to create and configure a Discord bot.

You will see how to create the bot, select the options you will need, give it the correct amount of permissions, and add it to your server.

Here is the link to the Discord Developer Portal: [https://discord.com/developers/applications](https://discord.com/developers/applications)

Create and Configure a Bot using the Discord Developer Portal

You'll be learning about collectors, sending custom messages, creating channels and roles, all dynamically. All of the different topics I cover in this course will be a guide for you to use each of these concepts individually so I highly encourage you to take what you learn to build something new and tell me what you build! 

I'll cover how to setup your bot in the discord developer portal then we'll set it up locally. I'll go over how to create a simple chat bot then go into much more detail on how to create slash commands. There is a break on lesson 5 where I'll go over some files that I've copy over from the Discord.js guide. There will be a template you can clone if you don't want to copy the files over yourself but I'll be running through each of them individually so you can understand what's going on.

The Discord.js guide is a super helpful resource when you need more information on specific topics you're struggling with. Discord.js also has a massive Discord channel that's a great place to ask questions that you just can't figure out yourself. The last resource is the Discord status page to check for things like api outages and other issues on Discord's side. All three of these resources will be linked down in the description. 

With that said, thank you for taking my course and let's get to it. 

Resources: 
- Discord.js Guide
    - [https://discordjs.guide/](https://discordjs.guide/)
- Discord Channel
    - [https://discord.com/invite/djs](https://discord.com/invite/djs)
- Discord Status Page
    - [https://discordstatus.com/](https://discordstatus.com/)

Introduction to Build a Book Club Bot with Discord.js

Build a Book Club Bot with Discord.js

Ghost has two hard dependencies which need to be installed before it can run. Those are Nginx and Node.js.

We will start by installing Nginx and set Nginx up to control the traffic coming into the EC2 server. After this, we'll install NVM using the raw install script that they provide on GitHub. With NVM installed we can then install the latest version of Node.js


Install Nginx and Node.js on a AWS EC2 Server

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

As you refactor and modify applications, it's difficult to manage and keep track of files as they become unused. Keeping this "dead" code around adds noise to your application and reduces clarity. Just as ESLint can tell us when variables become unused, Webpack (with the help of the unused-files-webpack-plugin) can tell us when entire files become unused. First, we'll install the plugin with npm and save it as a devDependency. Next, we'll use npm run scripts to build a new command that will run Webpack with the plugin. Finally, we'll learn how to use Webpack environment variables to conditionally add plugins to your Webpack config. By the end of the lesson, you'll have a useful cli command you can run to check for unused modules in your Webpack build

Delete Unused Code with Webpack and unused-files-webpack-plugin

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

In this lesson, we'll configure webpack to use the Babel loader for our JavaScript files, allowing us to transpile our source files and generate a bundle for deploying our application.

Configure webpack to Load JavaScript Files through Babel with babel-loader

While we're developing an application, having a local server to preview our work is a great convenience. With `webpack`, we can take advantage of `webpack-dev-server` to serve up files and automatically reload the browser when we make changes. In this lesson, we'll install and configure `webpack-dev-server` in our boilerplate project.

Serve a webpack Bundle while Developing with webpack-dev-server

We can separate our custom application code from the common libraries we leverage, such as React and ReactDOM. In this lesson we'll configure `webpack` to treat React and ReactDOM as external dependencies. Then we'll update our HTML template to conditionally include the CDN links for those libraries for production builds.

Externalize Dependencies to be Loaded via CDN with webpack

Bundle size has a huge impact on JavaScript performance. It's not just about download speed, but all the JavaScript we ship to the browser needs to be parsed and compiled before it can be executed. Keeping our bundle in check can be difficult, but it's much easier when we can see where the bloat is coming from. In this lesson, we'll add the `webpack-bundle-analyzer` plugin to inspect the output of our production build.

Analyze a Production JavaScript Bundle with webpack-bundle-analyzer

I've been using Cursor for a very long time and their "Agent" feature in Composer is fairly new, so I'm still getting used to it. But since Windsurf recently got onto the stage with their Cascade agent, they've slowly been gaining the mind share on the UX for coding agents. I decided to put them to the test by putting Windsurf and Cursor on the exact same screen side by side trying to accomplish the same task and to see which workflow I would prefer. I've been a diehard Cursor user for over a year now, so it's going to take a lot for me to switch to a different IDE. But I just have to say, even from this simple demo, Windsurf is looking pretty nice.

This lesson is just going to walk through creating a CLI using both tools to print out inspirational quotes and to explore how they approach the step-by-step of installing packages and running commands and setting up all the files we need to get this running.

Windsurf Cascade vs. Cursor Composer Agent Side-by-Side Comparison

This TypeScript tutorial explains how to use generics, allowing for different types to be passed as arguments. It discusses the use of shorthand syntax in generics and illustrates with examples. This method is useful for library creation, providing type safety and control to the user.

```typescript
interface PhotoMetadata<T> {
  title: string;
  takenAt: Date;
  customData: T;
}

// Function that processes a photo with custom metadata
function processPhoto<T>(photo: PhotoMetadata<T>): {
  processedTitle: string;
  daysSinceCapture: number;
  customDataSummary: T;
} {
  const today = new Date();
  const daysSinceCapture = Math.floor(
    (today.getTime() - photo.takenAt.getTime()) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24)
  );

  return {
    processedTitle: photo.title.toUpperCase(),
    daysSinceCapture,
    customDataSummary: photo.customData
  };
}

// Example usage with different custom data shapes
type CameraSettings = {
  iso: number;
  aperture: string;
  shutterSpeed: string;
}

type LocationData = {
  latitude: number;
  longitude: number;
  locationName: string;
}

// Using with camera settings
const photoWithCamera: PhotoMetadata<CameraSettings> = {
  title: "Sunset at beach",
  takenAt: new Date('2024-01-15'),
  customData: {
    iso: 100,
    aperture: "f/2.8",
    shutterSpeed: "1/1000"
  }
};

// Using with location data
const photoWithLocation: PhotoMetadata<LocationData> = {
  title: "Mountain vista",
  takenAt: new Date('2024-02-01'),
  customData: {
    latitude: 45.5231,
    longitude: -122.6765,
    locationName: "Mount Hood"
  }
};

const processedCameraPhoto = processPhoto(photoWithCamera);
const processedLocationPhoto = processPhoto(photoWithLocation);

processedCameraPhoto.customDataSummary.iso
processedLocationPhoto.customDataSummary.longitude

```

Basic Explanation of Typescript Generics

A very basic explanation of generic function arguments

I've been using Cursor as my primary editor for over a year now, but recently I've heard wonderful things about Windsurf AI Agent features. I decided to record myself building out something I've always wanted to make, but never made the time for.

In this lesson, I demonstrate how to leverage Windsurf's powerful agent process to create a fun word-guessing game inspired by Heads Up. Watch as I build an interactive application featuring category selection and word navigation, complete with data hosting on GitHub Gists and deployment to GitHub Pages - all in under 30 minutes (before editing the lesson down to 12 minutes)!

What makes this project particularly exciting is how Windsurf eliminates the typical friction points of development. While this game was always on my project wishlist, the overhead of setup, configuration, and deployment made it hard to justify the time investment. Windsurf's agent process handles all these pain points seamlessly, from managing URLs to orchestrating deployment.

This lesson perfectly showcases how AI agents can help developers bring their backlog of project ideas to life, transforming what would typically be time-consuming tasks into efficient, enjoyable development experiences.

Build a Word Game with Windsurf's Cascade AI Agent



Discover how to harness the power of Cursor IDE's Composer Agent feature to optimize your code. In this lesson, you'll witness an AI agent doing all the work to generate test suites, implement performance benchmarks, and create optimized function variations - all without writing a single line of code. You'll learn how to validate performance improvements through data-driven benchmarking, ensuring that optimizations are backed by concrete metrics rather than speculation. This hands-on demonstration showcases a groundbreaking approach to automated function development that combines the precision of test-driven development with the efficiency of AI-powered optimization.


Agent-Driven Development in Cursor: Testing, Benchmarking, and Optimizing Functions

This course is aimed for using `zod` effectively in projects based on TypeScript (both browser and node.js). The benefits you gain with this course is not just simply coding, but also understanding when/why/how should you perform runtime validation.

`zod` is the missing piece to TypeScript's capabilities, which can guarantee type-safety only in compile-time.

`zod` can be used whenever the compiler cannot guarantee what happens in runtime. And... it's a very frequent usecase, such as HTTP calls, websockets, etc.

In this course you get quickly up and running by:
1. using `zod` with primitives and objects
2. adapting `zod` quickly to existing projects thanks to automatic generators
3. changing the strategy frm type-first to schema-first
4. using error-throwing `parse` or non-error-throwing `safeParse` basing on your needs
5. applying `zod` to the most common usecase - validating API responses
6. handling errors the most convenient way (out of many!)

Take advantage of runtime validation with `zod`. Take advantage of the detailed lessons in this course 🔥

Effective Runtime Type Checks with Zod


Cursor can now automatically run commands in the terminal and walk step-by-step towards building out your entire project. You give it a goal, then it will suggest the commands you need to run and the files that you need to create and you can work with it to achieve what you're building. This lesson does a quick walkthough of using a Cursor Agent to build a project from scratch and guide it along the way. Cursor Agents definitely feel like a sneak peek at the future of programming!

Cursor Agents Initial Impressions - Allow an AI to Build Your Entire Project

Mock Service Worker is an API mocking library that allows you to write client-agnostic mocks and reuse them across any frameworks, tools, and environments.



Mocking WebSocket APIs with Mock Service Worker


While using anonymous functions might seem convenient, they can create difficulties when trying to identify performance bottlenecks during profiling. This lesson will demonstrate how named functions make it easier to pinpoint and address performance issues, ultimately leading to more efficient and debuggable code. Learning this practice will greatly improve your ability to locate and fix performance issues in complex projects.

Always Name Functions in JavaScript


When attempting to load the same module twice in JavaScript you'll hit a cache and code won't re-run. In scenarios where you actually do want to have state in your modules, you'll have to use a cache-busting technique by passing a query parameter to a dynamic import. This lesson walks through how to add a query parameter, how to add the appropriate types for loading dynamic modules in TypeScript, and when these techniques are valuable.

Import the Same JavaScript Module Multiple Times with Cache Busting



The include keyword in GitHub Actions empowers you to add custom variables to your matrix strategy, providing flexibility beyond standard configurations. In this video, we'll explore how include allows you to define specific combinations of variables, enhancing control over your workflow runs. You'll see how this feature enables you to tailor jobs for unique environments or scenarios not covered by the default matrix options. By leveraging include, you can efficiently manage complex build processes with greater precision. This technique helps you streamline your CI/CD pipeline, making it more adaptable to your project's evolving needs.

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