Thanks for the questions!
- Firstly, when deciding on the topic, I want to make sure I'll learn something new, this is one of the biggest factors for me - will I increase my knowledge by writing this tutorial. The actual research process involves:
Reading the official specification and the MDN documentation and making notes as I go along.
Use the feature (as a developer) and write down all the points I struggled with.
The tutorial then identifies those pain points, and how to work around it. The paint points I experienced is probably what folks reading the tutorial will experience also.
- Tools I really like:
Chrome DevTools ha!
TypeScript/Intellisense plugins for my editor (VS Code in my case), just really like autosuggest, I'm not a big TypeScript person though
runkit the amount of times it's saved me from having to install a node module locally...it's great! It basically makes it easy to prototype Node.js code, and it's interactive too.
- Nervousness is definitely normal! I still get nervous. The trick is to learn how to handle it well IMO.
For me the things I focus on are: can I demonstrate my passion of this subject through my delivery? If I can, chances are that passion will save the talk, even if the contents are bad. People tend to gravitate to those who are passionate about their interests! I appreciate that sounds a little cheesy.
The other thing is, rehearsals. It's true it can make you sound robotic, but for me rehearsals are about giving me confidence, it's not about memorising every single word. With passion + confidence, the rest of it seems to come a bit easier.
- Honestly over time I've moved away from those code challenge websites, some of them are so algorithm heavy, that it just feels like a chore. If that's your thing, LeetCode seems ok. Otherwise, I'm big on finding challenges set by companies I might potentially be interested in. I've written about this btw, here and here.
It's possible to search on GitHub for stuff like "<company name> challenge" and then do those. I reckon that's more valuable.
The biggest thing that's helped though is solving my own challenges in code, and then referring prospective employers to that. Not