Learn Egghead, Firefox and Jekyll

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

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

Tips and Tricks

This is the video companion to the [egghead.io Instructor Guide](https://howtoegghead.com/instructor/).

Screencasting is hard! There are virtually infinite ways to produce one. For an egghead.io lesson we expect several key aspects to be met. We want to make sure that our lessons have depth and clarity. Clarity is important and starts with the technical aspects of recording your screen and voice. Once we have achieved this objective level of clarity, we dip into the stylistic aspects of recording a lesson. The style is subjective, and the goal of an egghead.io lesson is not to have an army of uniform drone producing flavorless video content for the masses.

Our mission is to make you a badass screencaster. We want to push you to another level. We've found that a small set of standard practices will create an awesome experience for the student, and eliminate frustration as we teach by providing a repeatable pattern for success. It’s not complicated. In fact, it is simple, but it isn’t easy.


This course will show you how to produce an egghead.io lesson. We strive for consistency in style, and these lessons will demonstrate the core elements that create our brand screencasts. Let’s learn how together.

Bite-size video tutorials for badass web developers.

egghead

Record Badass Screencasts for egghead.io

Any extra information on the screen will easily distract the audience from the purpose of your lesson. Do your best to remove any extra notifications, UI, or other information that would take away from what you're teaching.

Remove Distractions

Any information you would want to put into an Intro or Outro belongs in the accompanying description, title, course page, etc. The lesson is only for showing the process. Talking about yourself, the lesson, or other lessons is a waste of time.

Avoid Intros and Outros

Tangents are opportunities for other lessons. When you find yourself drifting off-topic because you feel you _need_ to explain  some code you wrote, consider how that piece of code fits back into a "How do I?" question, then come up with a separate lesson to capture it.

Stay on Topic

Recording can be intimidating, so it's best to just hit the record button and start talking. Take it one thought at a time. Sit quietly, think about what you're going to say/type, then do it. If you mess, up, undo back to when you were quiet and try again. Once you get a good take, move on to the next thought. The ideal raw recording is a ton of bad takes and one good take for each thought. So when you get to the editing phase, you quickly clear out the bad takes and leave the good ones.

Record One Thought at a Time

Editing a raw lesson video is a very simple process. You simply watch your own lesson and edit out all the bad takes and dead space using the "Ripple Delete" command. You will be left with a nice, cut lesson ready to export and upload.

Edit with Ripple Delete

Video is a one-way form of communication, so user's don't have the chance to ask you to clarify or ask "Where does X fit in?" This places the burden on you to guide their eyes as you explain how all the little pieces of the code fit together. When your application has a "flow", "X triggers Y, Y triggers Z", make sure to "show the flow" by walking them through where each chunk of code fits. This involves a lot of mouse movement (or fancy keyboard selection shortcuts) and hightlighting to bring it all together.

Guide Their Eyes

Code is usually pretty good at explaining itself. So it's best to just start writing code while you talking about it, then see if any additional explanation is required. When you fall into the trap of a long-winded explanation before you begin coding, you risk confusing the audience or unnecessarily repeating yourself.

Show First, then Maybe Explain

Before recording your first lesson, pick a title that accurately reflects what you plan on teaching. Use the "How do I..." trick to properly frame your lesson and title. "How do I dig a hole with a spoon?" would be answered with a lesson titled "Dig a Hole with a Spoon." Or "How do I eat a lobster with chopsticks?" would be answered with a lesson titled "Eat a Lobster with Chopsticks." 

Pick a Lesson Title

“We’ll just do it in post!”

This is always a phrase to be uttered with caution, but armed with just a couple of handy tools, we can to a lot of magic in post production even if we aren’t Hollywood editors. We will learn about the screencast editors best friend Ripple Delete. Then we will fine tune the recording removing any ummmm's or long running processes like installs or builds. Finally, we will make sure everything looks and sounds good and save it for publication!

Edit a screencast for publication

Teaching an egghead lesson should feel like walking the audience through a set of instructions. Do this, then that, move that, twist this, finally push that. The audience wants to see you putting the code together. Assembling your demo while they watch makes it feel much more real and achievable.

Teach Step-by-Step

Forgetting to change your resolution or setting up your mic will result in an unusable lesson. So please, please, please, set your resolution to 1280x720 (HiDPI), set your mic input to "Onyx Blackjack", and confirm that your mic loud enough (it helps to put your mouth as close to the mic as possible).

Prepare to Record - Screen Resolution and Mic Check

You aren’t the “1-take dizzle”. Instead of trying to get an entire lesson captured in a single capture, consider capturing audio and video in chunks. With our without a script, capturing in chunks makes it easy to redo parts and stay on-topic. You might see a repeating pattern of typing a bit of code > stop and explain as needed > typing a bit of code > repeat.

Capture video and audio in “bite-sized” chunks

Our lesson has been planned, recorded, and edited. It’s ready to be uploaded to egghead.io! Victory dance. Let’s see how it all turned out.

Review final screencast result

Setting up audio gear can be tricky. It goes from fairly straightforward “computer mic” to very complex “NPR sound booth”. We are striving for something in between. Most egghead recording gear uses a professional grade microphone, connected to a USB interface with an XLR cable, and finally, the USB interface connects to the computer. Regardless of the specific, we need to verify that it sounds good! In this lesson we show how to keep your audio volume input levels as high in the green as possible without turning red (clipping).

Verify my gear is properly set up

egghead.io lessons are example driven. We don’t rely on slide decks, instead we **focus on code**. This code first approach is how we explain things to students. Armed with a lesson title and summary that describes the goals, we will avoid polite introductions and jump right into showing how to make code.

Create a self-contained code focused screencast

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

The React Developer Tools are an extension that can be added to Chrome and Firefox to help with debugging React applications. In this lesson, we walk through how to use these developer tools to view, edit, and debug your React components, including: the `React` browser tab, inspecting components in parallel with the `Elements` tab, using React components in the console, searching by component name, and debugging component state and props.

Debugging components with the React Developer Tools extension

Good audio starts with quality gear. You can definitely record screencasts using the built-in microphone on your laptop, but we've found that our users want to have consistent high-quality audio.

We want you to sound amazing! Because you are.

To make this happen, we send each instructor professional grade audio recording equipment.

Once you've created a draft lesson that is almost ready to be published, we will ship you a case stuffed full of audio recording toys that will have you sounding awesome in no time.

Set up egghead audio gear to record lessons

For accessibility and quality, we capture our screens with maximum code and minimal distractions. Armed with a couple of tools and techniques we can create a desktop that focuses on the lessons. The resolution, font size, window layout, and menu bar management will all be wrangled into shape.

Prepare the computer desktop for screencast recording

The twelve-factor app is a development and deployment methodology for building apps with present-day concepts. Following it will ensure your app can be deployed easily and scaled effortlessly.

The website 12factor.net explains the concepts of the twelve-factor app. The lessons in this course each directly relate to one of the 12 factors and are presented in order. The first few go over revision control and managing the config and dependencies of your Node.js app, while the rest explain the devops of your app with Nginx & Docker, with concepts closely aligned to the 12-factor app.

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