Prerequisites? Typescript? Node?

I try to make my content for everyone, and I love helping beginners, especially people who career-switch into software engineering! 🥰

That means you’re always welcome to ask in the livestream chat, or the YouTube comments, or the Discord channel any questions you may have: regardless of your level of experience, or how “basic” you think your question may be!

However, when questions are not asked, I default to assuming some familiarity as outlined below:

Know enough of Node to have it installed

Node is the runtime needed to run Javascript on the server and also, in fact, on your machine!

You definitely should NOT install it from the official website, as different versions of Node have different features, and it’s extremely likely you’ll be working with projects that support different versions of Node. You don’t want to be figuring out that hassle, manually!

Thankfully, there’s a couple excellent tools for Node Version Management! Nowadays I favour Volta, but you’ll find a lot of content mentioning and using an old favourite NVM, which literally stands for Node Version Management after all.

Using a terminal & an IDE

Sometimes you’ll see me using commands on the terminal, spinning up local servers, Docker containers and so on. Most of the time I’m in an editor, using the Command Palette, multiline editing, and so on!

You don’t need to know exactly what I’m doing, but it helps to understand whereabouts things are happening 😄

I’m on a Mac, and lately I’ve switched back to iTerm2 with Oh My Zsh, and Starship.

For my IDE, I’ve been using VSCode for years and years!

Familiarity with Version Control and a Github account!

To get Johnnify Premium, you need a Github account, and you’ll need some familiarity with Git to clone my repositories, scaffold your own based-on them, commit and deploy and so on.

Git & Github may be one of those things that feel intimidating at first, but you can get over the initial hump and learn the fundamentals fast, and then you won’t be able to code without them 😍

I know trying to do GameDev with Unreal Engine without version control has been a horror for me; one of the reasons I’ve been loving Godot 😂

Javascript / Typescript?

I do assume you know a bit of Javascript, and also HTML & CSS, but I’m always delighted to explain concepts as we go!

And yes, I’ve always been Type-curious, and I’ve been trying Typescript, and Flowtype since their very early versions, when they were more of a hindrance that a help. They’ve matured, Typescript has become a defacto standard, and I’ve been heartily recommending it to everyone for the past few years.

Even if you’re a beginner and it looks like Typescript is strictly more stuff to learn, “just” stop overthinking and jump in to learning Typescript straight away 😄 Typescript is best at catching beginner errors and help you not shoot yourself in the foot!

React & Svelte?!

As above, I assume a bit of framework specific knowledge. Especially when we’re a few episodes deep in a livestream series, or it’s a more complicated project based on a simpler one, I’m more likely to stop repeating myself and let some concepts go by. But, I love explaining things, if something catches you out or stumps you, please ask!