Learn Egghead, Github and Particle

SSH provides a secure way for your to [connect to and authenticate with GitHub's servers](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/about-ssh). While HTTPS connections use usernames and passwords as credentials, SSH instead uses public and private key pairs. These can be generated on your system using a CLI like [`ssh-keygen`](https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent) and then associated with your GitHub account using the public key.

In some cases, you may need to connect to more than one GitHub account from the same system. For example, you may have [separate accounts for personal and professional projects](https://ryanharris.dev/managing-ssh-keys-for-github/), which can be difficult to manage manually. Using `ssh-agent` and a SSH configuration file, you can alleviate this pain point by automatically determining which key to use based on your GitHub repository's `git` URL.

Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. Bash is a command processor that typically runs in a text window, where the user types commands that cause actions. Bash can also read and execute commands from a file, called a shell script.

bash

Secure GitHub connections with SSH

Github Actions are an awesome tool from Github that allows us to automate tasks using code-based workflow configuration files. There's also a large marketplace that comes stocked with many useful tools that are ready out of the box.

But sometimes the options available don't completely solve our needs or maybe we're working with a new technology that's simply not available as an Action yet. Luckily, Github allows anyone to create their own Actions using common technologies like Javascript via Node.

We'll learn how to create a new Javascript-based Github Action running on Node. We'll first walk through a simple Hello World example, learn how to test it locally, version control it, use it in the wild, and move on to more advanced solutions that include using packages from npm!

GitHub fosters a fast, flexible, and collaborative development process that lets you work on your own or with others.

github

Create a New Github Action to Automate Code Tasks with Javascript

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.

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Tips and Tricks

Handy tips for boosting your productivity in GitHub. These are bite-sized things you can take advantage of today to boost your efficiency by 1% or more. What are you waiting for? Check 'em out! 

GitHub Tips & Tricks

GitHub Actions are a powerful workflow tool that allows you to write and use custom code to execute workflows. It's like a serverless CI/CD platform built directly into GitHub. We have access to GitHub's registries, our own repos, multiple platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), runtimes (VMs and Containers), and languages (JS, Rust, Go, etc) to perform any action we want. We can trigger workflows using GitHub's own events, our custom events, or even scheduled events like a cronjob.

GitHub Actions at Work

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.

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Record Badass Screencasts for egghead.io

Publishing a JavaScript library for public use requires some extra steps. You need to think about how people will use the library. From end users, to contributors your library now has a variety of people outside of yourself potentially making use of the code that you've released into the wild.

From Github and npm, to releasing beta versions, semantic versioning, code coverage, continuous integration, and providing your library with a solid set of unit tests, there are a ton of things to learn.

This series will guide you through a set of steps to publish a JavaScript open source library.

You might also enjoy [this article about contributing to open source](https://egghead.io/articles/get-started-contributing-to-javascript-open-source).

How to Write an Open Source JavaScript Library

“Feel free to submit a PR!” - words often found in GitHub issues, but met with confusion and fear by many. Getting started with contributing open source is not always straightforward and can be tricky. With this series, you’ll be equipped with the the tools, knowledge, and understanding you need to be productive and contribute to the wonderful world of open source projects. Much of this series speaks about GitHub, but most of the concepts are generally applicable to contributing to any open source project, regardless of where it’s hosted.

So enjoy the course and start contributing to the projects you use and love today!

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

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

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

npm packages almost always have a git repo tied to them for version control. We will start our package by initializing a git repository.

Add version control to npm packages using git init

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

Let's split our changes into separate commits. We'll be able to check over our changes before staging them all from the terminal. Then, we'll see the positive effect it has on our commit history.

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