Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀

22nd issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of the Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

If it’s your first time here… (otherwise, skip this part)

Being a web developer is a fantastic career option. You have many job opportunities, you can work around the world, and you get to solve hard problems. One hard thing, however, is staying up to date with the constantly evolving ecosystem. You want to be a top-performing web developer, coder, programmer, software developer, but you don’t have time to select from hundreds of articles, videos and podcasts each day.

This monthly newsletter is focused on keeping you up to date with the industry, keeping your skills sharp, without wasting your valuable time. I will be sharing the most important articles, podcasts and videos of the month. Think Tim Ferriss and the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the Software Development world. What’s the 20% that will get you 80% of the results?

What you missed in April as a Web Developer…

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ES2020 Features Finalized 🧘‍♂️

The ES2020 candidate has been finalized in April and we can now see what features will officially be part of this year's release. Are you excited? These stage 4 proposals are coming to a JavaScript interpreter near you. You can get into more detail here.

Free Tools For Web Developers ✂️

Some tools and assets to help you build your next project since we are best friends by now (unless this is your first time reading my articles… in that case let’s take things slow):

1. My new favourite color palette tool. #289797957 color palette tool on the web. Also, this one from Palette List is my second favourite
2. 50 free animated icons for your project
3. 404 illustrations for all those wrong URLs
4. Don't have Photoshop? Illustrator? Sketch? No problem, you can open all those files using this free online photo editing app now.
5. Enhance images using AI
6. Background generator with patterns of your choosing. And here is another one using CSS
7. How fast can your website be? Here is a tool to check your website speed
8. Free illustration packs
9. Make your CSS use Windows 98 styles
10. Check how responsive your web app is with all the different screen sizes

React News 💎

Mostly everyone's favourite frontend library. What crazy things have they been up to?

• An overview of the different folder structures you can have in React. Really enjoy these types of articles to show you the possibilities and let you chose the one appropriate for your project.

• A beautiful blog post showing you how to build a beautiful React component. I'm jealous of everything this blog does.

• New use-sound hook because who doesn't like "boing" sounds on their websites. Speaking of hooks, is it all as great as everyone seems to think? If you have been following this newsletter you know that there is no right answer... it really depends. However, Hackernews had a nice little battle between hooks vs anti-hooks people (I need a name for a Hooks fans that is appropriate... any ideas are welcome).

• A great article describing the Mental Models, or the high-level ideas behind React. At the end of the day, it's all just functions returning components to display on the screen.

• Some advanced and experimental performance profiling of React apps for those looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their apps.

• Did you know that Hot Reload and Fast Refresh are different things?

• Want to do Svelte like things without having to learn a new syntax? Well with this compiler, you pretty much can use React syntax and then have it compile to plain JS which is what Svelte does anyway.

• A one line library broke npm create-react-app for a bit this month. People lost their minds.

How About That Vue 3? 🔋

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Definitely not Vue 3 because we're still in Alpha stage...

Vue 3 isn't ready yet, but for those eagerly waiting for something more stable you can spend some time reading about what is expected to come to this major release one day.

What Is A Compiler? 🎛

Why would a web developer need to know what a compiler does? Well, it's because compilers are all around us. TypeScript, Svelte, Angular, React, etc... all use a compiler in some way. But what does it all mean? This article does a great job giving you a high-level overview of what a compiler does. Now that you have a good idea of what a compiler is, read how the Svelte compiler works just for fun. If you really want to dive deep, you can even learn about interpreters as well.

Building Secure And Reliable Systems 🔬

Although this may be a little "too much information" for a web developer, it is still nice to browse through. Security is crucial to the design and operation of scalable systems in production, as it plays an important part in product quality, performance, and availability. Google just released this book you can read for free. In this book, experts from Google share best practices to help your organization design scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure. It's 500 pages... so maybe save it for a rainy day?

How To Deploy? 🏰

Slack shared with us their method of deploying code to production. A nice little overview of how a big company like Slack delivers code to customers and an interesting overview of one of the possible ways to do deployments. I like their system a lot (but I still prefer using Discord for our online community chat 😉).

Github Yoda 🦉

We all spend a lot of time on Github. What if I told you that you can be more productive, more efficient, and much cooler using it? Well here is an article that will make you 10x cooler on Github with tricks, tips and hacks.

JavaScript Modules 🤹‍♀️

JavaScript was initially written with no modules in mind. That is, it was designed as a toy language that is supposed to be written all in one file. But things have changed and we have large JavaScript codebases. So what happened? Here is the crazy world of JavaScript modules and all the things that happened, and are happening, to allow JavaScript to finally have multiple files in a project.

Internet Explorer Exodus 🎻

For those who have been doing this for a while, know how painful Internet Explorer was for web developers. Support for this outdated browser is slowly dropping, with a major announcement from one of the heaviest used libraries on the web: Bootstrap is dropping IE support.

Github Teams Is Free! 🎟

Microsoft continues to try and dominate the programmer toolchain market and offer more value since acquiring Github. They just announced free private repositories with unlimited collaborators for teams with GitHub. If you are curious why Microsoft keeps doing these nice things for us, I explained their strategy in a past post here.

Dark CSS Generator 🌃

This is a really nice tool that allows you to use your current CSS and generates the "Dark" version of your app. Great tool for you to implement Light and Dark theme for your pages.

Speaking of CSS, did you know that you don't need commas anymore when specifying colors?

Gatsby, Zeit/Vercel, Netlify 🔮

What do all of these have in common? I recently tweeted about this and am working on something explaining this interesting development. However, here is the sneak peek: A new "Wordpress" is coming for those looking to create static pages like blogs as simple as it was with Wordpress. These big players above are all trying to own the market for hosting these types of pages. Zeit recently changed their name to Vercel as they raised VC money to compete in this space. Gatsby Cloud announced incremental builds.

Databases Are Everywhere 🗳

Yes they are. So you should be aware of how they work even if you are working as a frontend web developer. This article teaches you some of the basics of Databases without taking you too deep into the rabbit hole. Enjoy.

Node.js 14 With Modules 🛠

Node.js version 14 was released this month! This is the one that will have Long Term Support and include ES Modules (finally without the warning!), plus a few other goodies. Check out the breakdown of the Node.js 14 release.

Angular vs React vs Vue vs Svelte 💣

Yes, the age-old debate of what is best. As humans, we always like to ask this question. Who would win in a fight: A tiger or a lion? I don't know but have always been curious...

Ok, let's get back on track. Here is a breakdown of these frameworks/libraries when it comes to the amount of JavaScript it ships.

Writing Technical Spec 🖋

I was really torn about including this resource in this newsletter. On one hand, planning and thinking about the code/project/feature you are about to implement is important. On the other hand, it can also lead to overcomplicating things, technical jargon, and unnecessary delay in shipping something. However, sometimes a job requires you to write a technical spec document. If that need does arise, here is a guide on writing one.

News Around the World 🗺

• Iranian version of Telegram (since they do not have access to the official Telegram messaging app because of sanctions) leaked 42 million user data. Not good.

• After 50 Years of Effort, Researchers Made Silicon Emit Light. What did you just read? Trust me on this... this is a super interesting and easy to read article on some of the things happening in the hardware space.

• Mongolia is planning on restoring their traditional alphabet and replacing the Cyrillic script adopted under the Soviet period. Not sure how this is related to web development but pretty interesting...

Big Tech News 🏢

• Google and Apple are going to start introducing something called Contact Tracing on their mobile devices. The promise is to make this feature available that allows apps to be built that help with reporting of Covid-19 cases while still keeping user data anonymous. Here is a nice recap of how this is supposed to work.

• It's a bad time for most businesses during these tough times. It definitely doesn't help WeWork and the company Meetup that they bought a while back. WeWork has now had to sell Meetup.

• You can't do much these days without hearing some news about Zoom video conferencing app. Their meteoric rise during these quarantine times has seen their user base skyrocket. It also showed how little they have paid attention to security on their side. Like [this]((https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/03/zoom-vulnerabilities/) and this. Reporting Zoom vulnerabilities might become an Olympic sport. Google wants to catch up now so they are making Google Meet free for use (used to be a paid enterprise video conferencing app).

• Apple announced a more budget-friendly iPhone. Expect the Apple phone user base to increase because of this. Apple also gave this programmer $75,000 for discovering a vulnerability in Safari that allowed unauthorized websites to access your camera on iOS and macOS.

• IBM is offering free COBOL programming courses because there is a bump in demand, and there are not a lot of people who still know this ancient programming language.

• Did you know that if you are a Windows user you can have Linux running by using something called the Windows Subsystem for Linux? Well, the 2nd version, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 is now generally available. As a Windows user, this means you can do a lot of terminal things that users on MacOS and Linux do and feel like part of the club.

• Google is slowing down hiring for the rest of 2020. Not good news for those trying to land a job at these big tech companies since I am sure the other big tech giants are doing the same.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Who needs to learn Unity? Psssht... Anybody can be a game developer using Google Docs now. That's right, here is a choose your own adventure game built just with Google Documents.

I have to share this because it is hilarious. Check out the cover image of this website. Introducing the most depressing thing I have ever seen in remote office design. Just me?

Also, people have too much time on their hands...

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Cognitive biases in software development. These types of articles to me are more important than overly technical ones. Being a good programmer isn't just about your technical knowledge. This article is a must-read this month to understand some of the biases we have as programmers. Knowing that they exist will help you notice them in the future... hopefully.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Can you make a youtube video with a dynamic title? That is, a title that is constantly changing based on the number of views? This video will blow your mind and teach you things that you may not have even realized.

• And remember, dealing with isolation is not supposed to be easy. Stay safe out there and take care of yourself. This may help.

See you next month everyone!

By the way, my full-time job is to teach people to code in the most efficient way possible as the Lead Instructor of Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of my courses below or see all of my courses by visiting the courses page.