 Resources from Steven Mercatante in 2022

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

vscode

VS Code Extensions

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications.

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

elixir

The pipe operator is an easy to use and powerful feature of Elixir. It takes the output from the expression on the left, and automatically passes it as the first argument to the function on the right. This is especially useful when chaining together multiple function calls or data transformations. Using the pipe operator results in code that's easier to read, write and refactor.

Chain Function Calls with the Pipe Operator in Elixir

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

You already know that Apollo Client can manage your remote data and state from a GraphQL server, but did you know that you can also use it to manage local state in your React apps? You can! 

`apollo-link-state` lets you query and mutate local state the same as you would a GraphQL server. This means that you don't need to add _another_ dependency like Redux or MobX to your app. 

Managing your remote and local state using the same interface results in a codebase that's easier to maintain and reason about.

Manage local state in React using GraphQL and Apollo Client.

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

Figuring out the singular and plural versions of words is a piece of cake when you use the inflection library. Stop wasting time wondering how to write a function that pluralizes words like mouse or cactus. And learn how the ordinalize function easily adds the correct suffix to numbers.

Singularize, Pluralize and Ordinalize English Words in JavaScript

VSCode gives us plenty of options for navigating and editing our code without needing to leave the keyboard. Learn these commands to speed up your day-to-day work.

Navigate Code like a Pro in VSCode

The better-comments extension lets us specify different types of comments and color them accordingly. This lets you add semantic meaning to your comments, for example: you can mark some comments as TODO, and others as important, or as questions. You can also define your own custom types of comments.

Write Better Comments in VS Code

The Turbo Console Log extension lets us quickly add console.log statements with additional data, which makes debugging your code easier.

Make Console Logging in VS Code 10x Easier with Turbo Console Log

The VSCode Dimmer extension is great when you want to show and explain code to someone. It helpfully dims the code that's not relevant to the selected line, making it easier for your audience to focus on what you want them to.

Use VSCode Dimmer to Highlight Code when Teaching

Managing form state in React is so much easier with hooks. Learn how to manage a login form's state using the `useState` hook.

Manage form state with React hooks

Form validation in React can be tricky, but it doesn't need to be! In this lesson I'll show you how to add client-side validation to your React forms using the `yup` library.

Add client-side validation to your React forms

Gatsby is a blazing fast static site generator built with React. Gatsby gives you all of the modern JavaScript tools you want; set up and ready to go out of the box.

gatsby

It's useful being able to control when your Gatsby posts are published, but Gatsby doesn't give you that ability out of the box. Learn how to add a `published` field to your posts so you can control their visibility. 

Add a Published Field to Your Gatsby Posts to Control Their Visibility

We can pass custom data to our Gatsby pages by overriding the `onCreatePage` function and using its `context` object. This is really useful when you want to provide custom data to GraphQL queries, or your page components.

Pass Custom Data to Gatsby Pages

Learn how to add custom JavaScript to your Gatsby's main HTML.