 Resources from Xiaoru Li in 2024

(This collection is still WIP)

Databases are essential for any full-stack applications, but working with them is traditionally very difficult. Prisma is here to change that. It's a powerful database toolkit that helps us think in data itself - not SQL, not classes, just the data we care about in our apps.

In this series, we will learn how to leverage the power of Prisma to automatically generate a type-safe, autocomplete-ready, and efficient query builder, all based on a simple and easy-to-read schema. We will integrate all this good stuff into a Next.js project to complete a simple social network app.

In the end, you will be able to understand how Prisma works, and confidently start using Prisma in your own project.

Prisma is a next-generation open-source ORM For Node.js and TypeScript that helps developers build faster and make fewer errors.

It supports the following databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, SQLite, and more recently, MongoDB (Preview).

Prisma provides a complete toolkit:

- Prisma Client: Auto-generated and type-safe database client
- Prisma Migrate: Declarative data modeling and customizable migrations
- Prisma Studio: Modern UI to view and edit data


prisma

Build a full-stack app with Prisma

[Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) is a fantastic framework that allows us to build performant server-side rendered React apps with ease.

In this series, we will learn how to utilize the powerful features of Next.js 9, like API routes and Static Site Generation (SSG), to build full-stack React apps. We will use [Auth0](https://auth0.com) to handle user authentication and authorization, and we'll also learn how to integrate the excellent [Chakra UI](https://chakra-ui.com/) component library into our Next.js project to make it a breeze to build beautiful and modularized user interfaces. Finally, we will import and deploy our project from GitHub to [Vercel](https://vercel.com), the deployment platform built by the creators of Next.js.

This collection will still be continuously updated with new and more advanced content. Subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified of the latest lessons!

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

Introduction to Next.js 9

Go is a server-side language, but today we can compile Go code to WebAssembly as well - making it possible for us to bring programs written in minimalistic Go code into the browser!

With this collection, we will learn how to compile and run Go WebAssembly programs in Node.js and the browser, and how our Go code can interop with JavaScript and manipulate the DOM. We will also talk about configuring our VS Code workspace and optimizing the Go WASM binary size.

Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

WebAssembly with the Go Language

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

*Go ^1.12, Node ^12.14.0*

Compiling Go programs to WebAssembly does not require Emscripten, and the process is pretty straight forward. In this lesson, we will learn how to compile a simple Go program to a WebAssembly binary, then execute it with Node.js.

Compile and execute a Go WebAssembly program with Node

Sometimes we need to prevent some properties on a JavaScript object from being iterated over and accessed in "for ... in" loops.

In this lesson, we will learn how to use `Object.defineProperty()` to hide existing properties on an object by setting the property descriptor flag `enumerable` to `false`.

Hide Properties from Showing Up in "for ... in" Loops in JavaScript

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

chrome-devtools

When building a web app, sometimes we need to approach it top-down. Modern browser devtools allow us to set breakpoints not only on the JS code but also on the DOM as well, so we can easily pin down which lines of code are to be executed deep inside the code base, by pausing the execution based on DOM changes.

In this lesson, we will learn how to set and remove DOM breakpoints in Chrome DevTools.

Set and remove DOM Breakpoints

*Go ^1.12, TinyGo ^0.12.0, Node ^12.14.0*

The WebAssembly binaries generated by the standard Go compiler are often unnecessarily large. In this lesson, we will learn techniques to optimize Go Wasm binary size with an alternative compiler that is designed for microcontrollers - TinyGo.

Optimize Go WebAssembly binary size with TinyGo

*Go ^1.12*

In this lesson, we will learn how to load and use a Go WebAssembly binary in a web app.

Manually load a Go WebAssembly binary in a browser

*Go ^1.12*

In this lesson, we will see how we can interact with the JavaScript environment by using Go's `syscall/js` module to call and pass values into a JavaScript function, and access variables available in JS land.

Access JS Functions and Variables from a Go WebAssembly Program

*Go ^1.12*

When using Go modules related to WebAssembly, namely `syscall/js`, the default settings in VS Code will trigger error reports like *"Build constraints exclude all Go files"* in the editor. In this lesson, we will learn how to fix this and improve our coding experience.

Configure Go Build Constraints in VS Code to work with WebAssembly

*Go ^1.12*

The ability to manipulate the DOM is sometimes crucial when it comes to working with apps powered by WebAssembly. In this lesson, we will see how we can utilize Go's `syscall/js` module to interact with the DOM by porting a sample JS code snippet to Go.

Interact with the DOM using Go's `syscall/js` module

*Go ^1.12*

In this lesson, we will see how we can expose Go lang functions from a WebAssembly module so that we can interact with them from the JavaScript environment.

Call a Go WebAssembly function from JavaScript

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

In this lesson, we will learn how to initialize a Next.js 9 project with TypeScript support from scratch.

Initialize a Next.js 9 project with TypeScript

Next.js treats single-file components in the `/pages/` directory as pages, so we need to work around this abstraction to access and modify the `<head>` element of the page. In this lesson, we will learn how to render the `<head>` element dynamically with a constantly updated title in Next.js 9, and see how this feature can be helpful for loading custom fonts.

Render the <head /> element dynamically in Next.js

In this lesson, we will learn how to set up and use Chakra UI with Next.js.

We'll use Chakra UI to customize the way Next.js styles every page in our application by defining a `_app.tsx` file. We'll wrap our app in the `ThemeProvider` that Chakra gives us as well as use `CSSReset` to reset the default browser styling.

After this initial set up, you'll see how easy it is to start styling pages with Chakra by using components like `Heading`, `Link`, and `Flex` exposed from the core package.

Set up Chakra UI to work with Next.js

The "API routes" in Next.js are Node.js serverless functions that we can easily incorporate into our app.

In this lesson, we will learn how to write API request handlers, and how to set up dynamic API routes. After this lesson, you'll be able to create simple API endpoints with Next.js ready to be used both in our frontend code within Next.js itself or for other general purposes.

Build straightforward API with Next.js API routes

The cool thing about Next.js API routes is that we can directly consume the API endpoints from pages.

SWR is a nice tool for handling data loading state in React apps using hooks, and is a perfect companion for our Next.js application. In this lesson, we will learn how to use [SWR](https://swr.now.sh/) - a data fetching library by Zeit - to consume API endpoints on the client-side, and conditionally render an error or a loading component when the data is not available.

Consume Next.js API routes with the SWR library on the client-side

Since version 9.3, Next.js added a new life-cycle method `getStaticProps` for improved Static Site Generation (SSG) support, allowing us to fetch data and create static pages at build time. Together with the new data fetching method `getServerSideProps` used for Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Next.js allows us to clearly separate code intended for SSG or SSR. This is, in many cases, much better than the classic hybrid approach of `getInitialProps`.

In this lesson, we will import a JSON file from the file system in the `getStaticProps` life-cycle method of a Table of Contents page, so that we can render links based on the content we have, and statically generate the page at build time. At the end of this lesson, we will export our app using the `next export` command to a fully static website.

After this lesson, you will be able to optimize pages that don't need to be updated often on every request by only pre-generating them at build-time, utilizing the new SSG feature.

Static Site Generation (SSG) in Next.js with `getStaticProps`

The companion life-cycle method `getStaticPaths` of `getStaticProps` lets us use the data we have at build-time to specify which dynamic routes (like `/pages/blog/[slug]`) we want to generate statically.

In this lesson, we will learn how these two functions can be used in conjunction with each other to fetch mock blog data from the file system, then generate static HTML files for each blog post route. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to fully utilize the powerful Static Site Generation (SSG) feature of Next.js to build and optimize your next project.

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Xiaoru Li