Learn Mac, Serverless and Tmux

Starting from a prebuilt frontend, Jason Lengstorf guides you through the creation of a "Corgi Up-boop App" that uses Netlify Functions and Hasura. You can view [the deployed final product on Netlify](https://egghead-serverless-functions.netlify.app/).

You'll set up the Netlify CLI, and configure a local development environment before writing and deploying functions with a few different use cases.

The first example function bypasses CORS restrictions to retrieve corgi data from an example third-party API.

Next, you'll configure environmental variables to securely communicate with the Unsplash API without exposing private keys to the client.

Serverless functions don't persist data by themselves, so we will use  Hasura to create a GraphQL API for tracking the number of "boops" each corgi receives.

This course is an excellent illustration of the speed of Serverless functions, and how fast you can implement functionality in your web applications.

An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS.

netlify

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

Bash makes automation easy. Just a few lines of code can take care of repetitive tasks for you and your teammates. 

In this course, we’ll dive deep into the automation potential of bash. You’ll learn to leverage common hooks that open up interesting automation possibilities, like git hooks, adding functions and aliases in your bash_profile, and running scheduled jobs in launchd.

For example, we’ll write a git hook that checks package.json for changes, and if there are changes, the hook runs npm install for you automatically. 

Along the way, you’ll also learn:

- more advanced bash commands like exec
- syntax such as redirecting stdout and stderr to the same destination
- timesaving tricks like brace expansions

Automation is all about saving you time — and at only 52 minutes, this course is well worth yours. Enjoy!

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

Advanced Bash Automation for Web Developers

Learn to manage your terminal sessions and work more effectively from the command line using tmux. If you use the command line at all, tmux can make your life easier.

tmux bills itself as a terminal multiplexer. It allows you to wrangle multiple terminal sessions from one window. Instead of keeping track of many terminal windows yourself, you can use tmux to create, organize, and navigate between them. Even more importantly, tmux lets you detach from and re-attach sessions, so that you can leave your terminal sessions running in the background and resume them later. This is especially useful if you're working on a remote server: you can set up a persistent session that will continue running when you close your laptop. You can even share a tmux session to facilitate pair programming.

It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal.

tmux

Wrangle your terminal with tmux

Joe Previte is an active egghead instructor and blogger. This is a collection of screencast versions of selected blog posts. You can find his blog here: [joeprevite.com](https://joeprevite.com/)

Joe's Blog Posts as Screencasts

`launchd` is a robust scheduled job automation tool on macOS that allows you to schedule a task to be run at recurring times. It's macOS's take on Linux's `cron`. In this lesson, we’ll schedule a simple bash script that empties the Trash to run every Monday morning at 10am. 

First, we’ll create a plist file (a plist file is just XML) with our job configuration. In here, we’ll specify our bash script as the program to run. Then we move plist file to the `~/Library/LaunchAgents` folder. Then we’ll use launchctl to load our configuration file, which will make the job active. We'll manually activate our job to ensure it's working with `launchctl kickstart`. 

Schedule Timed Jobs on macOS with `launchd`

AppleScript is a peculiar language with a COBOL-like desire to read like English, but it's the key to automating UIs on the Mac. We'll use it together with bash to make Terminal open a new window to run any shell command.

Run a Command-line App in a New Terminal Window using Bash and AppleScript

In [the previous lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/bash-run-a-command-line-app-in-a-new-terminal-window-using-bash-and-applescript "Run a command-line app in a new terminal window") we created a bash script that runs a given command line in a new Terminal window. Now we'll see how to use Automator to make an instance of that available as a menu item in Finder.

Turn a command-line app into a menu item in Finder

In [the previous lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/mac-turn-a-command-line-app-into-a-menu-item-in-finder) we saved a shell script as a service for Finder. This service takes in files as arguments and opens them in Vi. Now we'll save it as a real Mac App.

Turn a command-line app into a Mac App

Smooth your workflow by opening Finder from Terminal and vice versa at a specific folder.

Jump from Terminal to Finder and back again

I can make a subfolder of the folder that is open in Finder,
but there's no convenient way to make a subfolder of amy other folder that
is showing. Let's add a Finder service to take care of that.

Create a new subfolder of any selected folder in Finder with AppleScript

Create a Finder service that takes whatever you've selected, lets you navigate to a destination folder, and moves them there.

Create a service to move items in Finder to a user-selected folder with AppleScript

screen-reader

Learn the basics of navigating through a web page using VoiceOver on MacOS in Safari.

Navigate a Webpage with VoiceOver in Safari

Learn how to access the VoiceOver training and utility preferences on MacOs and how to make customizations to the screen reader.

Access and Customize VoiceOver Settings on MacOS

We should not use color alone as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.  Users may not be able to see/understand the differences in color and require additional indicators.

Along with color, use additional indicators such as:
* typography
* shapes
* grids
* spaces
* and/or allocate more weight to important elements

## References:
* http://www.particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindness/
* https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/color-contrast-tips-and-tools-for-accessibility/

Use More than Color Alone to Convey Information in a Web Page

WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. 

aria

It's very important to experience our web applications using the tools and techniques that our users are using.  Many of our users out there may have vision impairments and may use tools or adjust settings to help them see better. Learn how to change the accessibility display preferences on Mac to test your application for issues that may arise due to a lack of contrast between foreground and background colors in your web application which can be exacerbated when users have to adjust these display preferences.

## Resources
* [MacOS Display Preferences User Guide] (https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-accessibility-display-preferences-unac089/mac)

Change Display Preferences on Mac to Find Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

Just about every tool in our accessibility auditing toolkit can help us identify any issues with sufficient color contrast ratio on a web page.  The react-axe library and axe browser extension both report findings on all elements with insufficient contrast ratios.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any elements with their contrast ratios and color those that are insufficient in red.  

Additionally, we need to use our experience tools to see what some of our users out there may we seeing.  We need to test with high contrast browser extensions as well as the display settings in Windows and Mac.  If our users with visual impairments are using these tools we need to see what our application looks like using them because we may find that under a certain mode some things may suddenly be harder to read or virtually invisible.

## Resources
* https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/02/12/high-contrast-aria-and-images.html

Test for Insufficient Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

In this video, we'll learn how to modify the default screenshot keyboard shortcut on macOS so that it copies our screenshot to our clipboard. This comes in handy if you share screenshots often.

Change Default Screenshot Key to Copy to Clipboard

Switching project contexts causes needless friction and opportunities for distraction as we try to pull up related tabs and applications. I learned a trick from [David Sparks](https://www.macsparky.com/) on how to use the Mac automation software [Keyboard Maestro](https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/) to create palettes of shortcuts grouped by context. This has been an awesome boost to my productivity!

Seamlessly Switch Project Contexts with Keyboard Maestro

A serverless function is something that is going to allow us to do server-like things without having to manage servers, but an important distinction here is that serverless does not mean that there are **no** servers. 

The environment is actually running on top of an operating system and uses physical servers, but the responsibility for provisioning and managing the infrastructure belongs entirely to the service provider.

Some of the benefits of using serverless functions: 

- **Enhanced scalability.** No need for developers to implement code to scale. It scales automatically.
- **Reduced time to market.** Serverless is an optimized set of tools for building quickly.
- **No boiler code.** A serverless function is just a tiny piece of logic. Reducing the complexity of software.
- **More time for user experience.** Serverless functions allow teams to focus resources on the user experience and not on managing servers.
- **Security.** We can call third-party APIs securely without exposing important data on the client-side.

What Are Serverless Functions?

Netlify makes developing serverless functions easy with the netlify-cli (`ntl` for short). You'll be able to build and test functions locally as well as publish your functions from the CLI. 

We will install netlify-cli globally and create a `netlify.toml` file that will configure where the CLI should look to run functions that we define, in our case `functions/`. When the application is served up, Netlify runs functions under `/.netlify/functions/`.

Topics

Instructors

Content Type

Free or Pro

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

Advanced Bash Automation for Web Developers

Wrangle your terminal with tmux

Joe's Blog Posts as Screencasts

Schedule Timed Jobs on macOS with `launchd`

Run a Command-line App in a New Terminal Window using Bash and AppleScript

Turn a command-line app into a menu item in Finder

Turn a command-line app into a Mac App

Jump from Terminal to Finder and back again

Create a new subfolder of any selected folder in Finder with AppleScript

Create a service to move items in Finder to a user-selected folder with AppleScript

Navigate a Webpage with VoiceOver in Safari

Access and Customize VoiceOver Settings on MacOS

Use More than Color Alone to Convey Information in a Web Page

Change Display Preferences on Mac to Find Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

Test for Insufficient Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

Change Default Screenshot Key to Copy to Clipboard

Seamlessly Switch Project Contexts with Keyboard Maestro

What Are Serverless Functions?

What Are Serverless Functions?

Set up a Local Development Environment for Serverless Functions Using Netlify