Learn Egghead, Particle and Redwoodjs

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

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

RedwoodJS takes the JAMstack philosophy to the next level. It brings together all the tools modern web development has to offer:

- React
- GraphQL
- Prisma

RedwoodJS abstracts database management away from you so that you can just build your schema and it will do all the plumbing. This collection will go over how to create a RedwoodJS project and the scripts that will help make your developer experience a joy.


Bringing full-stack to the JAMstack

Do you love the JAMstack philosophy but need a database-backed web app? Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

redwoodjs

Introduction to RedwoodJS: full-stack framework for JAMstack

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

chrome-devtools

Your page is showing high CPU usage and spinning up your laptop fan, but nothing is visibly happening. What is it doing, and why is it so slow?

This lesson is a real-world performance diagnosis of this very page, right here on egghead. Two infinite (but hidden) animations were causing CPU usage to spike, and Chrome's Task Manager and Performance tools helped uncover the elements causing the problem. You'll see how to use the profiler to record a snapshot, and learn a trick for discovering animations running in the background.

Diagnose a Slow Page Using Developer Tools

codesandbox.io provides one of the fastest ways to start a new React project. In this lesson, we will take a first look at codesandbox, its interface, and the default React project it creates.

Use Codesandbox to Start a New React Application

By re-assigning a couple mouse buttons, you can drastically improve the speed you can edit your lessons in Screenflow. This lesson shows how to customize using the Logitech software, but the concept should work for any mouse customization software as well.

Faster Edits in Screenflow with Mouse Customizations

Sometimes you have an idea that you want to quickly record, but the idea of setting up a project just to get it recorded gets in your way. I'm going to walk your through scripting away the main setup pain points so that you can focus on creating content.

Automate egghead Lesson Setup with ZSH Shell Functions

When making your font sizes large, your code will often get to long to fit on the screen. This lesson shows you how to use "word wrap" or "prettier print width" to adjust your code to fit within the editor.

Reformat Code to Fit the Screen

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

We use `yarn redwood generate page` (`yarn rw` for short) in this lesson to generate an `IndexPage` component. 

The first argument to `yarn rw generate page` is the name of the page you are generating. The second argument is the path you want the page to show up on. So `yarn rw generate page index /` will generate an `IndexPage` component and insert a route entry in our `web/src/Routes.js` file.

We learn that redwood import `React` for you so you don't have to import it manually when you are creating a component.

Generate a Page Using the Redwood CLI

In this lesson, we are going over how to generate a `RedwoodJS` project.

We can create a `RedwoodJS` project with `yarn create redwood-app ./my-redwood-project`.

`yarn` will generate the `RedwoodJS` app in the file folder you specified without installing any globals.

To run the `RedwoodJS` app, we use `yarn redwood dev`. This runs the Redwood client as well as the `GraphQL` backend.

Generate a Redwood Project

RedwoodJS provides a `Link` component that we can use to navigate around our app. We can provide a `to` prop with the path that we want to navigate to.

RedwoodJS takes this a step further and provides a `routes` object from `@redwoodjs/router`. This object is aware of all the routes defined in `web/Routes.js`. This allows us to use the methods on this object rather than referencing the our routes with a string literal. We can then change the route path without having to change all of the references to that route all over our app.

Use RedwoodJS Link and routes Object to Navigate

RedwoodJS gives us a cli command to generate layouts.

`yarn redwood generate layout main`

This will generate a `MainLayout` component in `src/layouts/MainLayout/`. We can use this layout component to define any headers or footers we want to share across multiple pages. 

Extract a RedwoodJS Layout Component

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

vscode

In this lesson, we will learn how to use custom ENV variables to customize the PS1 Bash/Zsh command prompt in the VS Code terminal, without affecting our custom terminal themes in other applications. We will see how this can be useful for keeping the terminal clean for screen recordings.

I'm using Zsh in this video, but this works in Bash with `~/.bashrc` as well.

Customize the PS1 Bash/Zsh Command Prompt in VS Code with Environment Variables

Lessons often have common starting points. If you're going to make lessons in bulk, it helps to create templates so you don't waste time setting them up over and over.

Create a Lesson Template

Once your lesson template is ready, it's time to create some github repos to share your code. The easiest way to do this is with Github's CLI tool called "hub".

Create Repos on Github from the CLI with hub

ZSH allows you to write functions to wrap around common commands. These allow you to easiest invoke a number of lesson creation steps by only typing out the command.

Automate Lesson Creation From Templates With ZSH Functions

Forgetting to pass an argument to a zsh function could result in creating unnecessary folders or cloning code you didn't mean to. It's best to check for arguments to prevent unwanted results.

Add Conditions to ZSH Functions to Prevent Mistakes

Once you've finished your demo locally, it's time to commit, push it to github, and share your demo online. This zsh function breaks it down into a single call.

Branch and Create a Lesson in a Single ZSH Function

Alfred is a super speed booster when it comes to common tasks. If you're going to be creating a lot of lessons from templates, Alfred can save you from even opening your terminal.

Select a Lesson Template From an Alfred Workflow

Using Alfred, you can map a global keyboard shortcut to the process of cloning a lesson template repo and firing up your demo.

Launch a New Lesson From a Keyboard Shortcut

Ripple Delete is the most common command you will perform when editing with Screenflow, thus we should make it the simplest action to perform. Unfortunately, it requires a mouse click + shift and a command + delete. We can bind this sequence to a right mouse click using Karabiner mappings.

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