Building a “shoutout” component in plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript

Every Wednesday I host WeAreDevelopers Live on YouTube. Afterwards we cut out short videos to post on social media. What we needed was an obvious “shoutout moment” in the recording to indicate an interesting quote or when we moved on to the next topic – much like a clapper in classic movies to sync audio and video. To this end, I wrote some functionality to show a “cool” and “next” overlay that will make it easier in post production to find the interesting spots. Here’s what that looks like:

You can try the functionality out yourself by checking this codepen, focusing on the browser part and pressing either the `[` or `]` key.
You can also watch the following video to get this article as a step-by-step explanation:

And there is a detailed explanation of the code on the WeAreDevelopers Magazine.

I just love how easy these things are nowadays in HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript.