Web Developer Monthly (December 2020)

30th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our 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 December as a Web Developer…

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):

Traffic analyzer for websites and your competitors
You know I have to include at least one of these every month
Check how much JS your website ships
Free Programming books for you this holiday season
404 Page inspirations
6 files you need to favicon right

Holiday Gift 🎁

I feel like we know each other well by now... and as you know, this newsletter takes me a really long time to write every month. Between reading all the articles that come out, sifting through the best ones, and forcing my fingers to type this ever expanding newsletter, it's a lot of work. The effort makes it all worth it because of the fact that people read it though. Therefore, please take a second right now to share this newsletter with friends and others in the industry this holiday season. The more readers that this gets, the more I can invest in continuing to do this every month :)

Did you share it? If you did, you're the best and you can keep reading...

React News 💎

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

React Server Components is the big talk of the month in the front end world. After a pretty quiet year from the React team, they dropped a present this month. Mind you, this is all experimental which means it will take a long time and probably will look different come its release. You can check out the announcement here. The summary: React Server Components run only on the server and they have no impact on the client side JS bundle size. A general move towards server rendering is happening in the industry.
Nextra is a Next.js based static site generator. 0 line of code needed and it supports Markdown with React components (MDX), automatically generated sidebar and anchor links, file-system based routing, built-in syntax highlighting, i18n and more.
The BBC website over the past 12 months migrated pages which are spread across 41 discrete sites from a legacy PHP monolith to a new React based application. This application is called Simorgh, an open source, isomorphic single page application developed by the team. Here is how they did it.
The Preact organization just release a new tool WMR: The tiny all-in-one development tool for modern web apps, in a single 2mb file with no dependencies.
Simplest way to add authentication to your React apps.
How Lyft is Migrating 100+ Frontend Microservices to Next.js... because Frontend Microservices are a terrible idea.
5 common Hooks mistake to avoid (more on this later in this newsletter)

4 Things To Keep An Eye On In 2021 🙈

Deno – a more secure and modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. Deno will continue to make a big splash in 2021.

ESBuild – a JavaScript bundler and minifier that’s worth keeping an eye on

Rome – a single toolchain that’s meant to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, and Jest. It's an ambitious goal though...

Vercel/Gatsby/AWS/Netlify - All of them are betting on them being the new Wordpress for 2021 and dominate the future landscape of static websites (think blog type websites that dominate the wordpress market). Even Cloudflare is now getting in on the action.

But remember the simple truths that will never change...

State Of CSS 🧬

The popular state of CSS results are out with what is happening in the CSS world. Big takeaways include CSS Grid being the default way to build responsiveness, TailwindCSS growing in popularity, general adoption of Atomic CSS principles, and Bootstrap still dominating with their amount of themes and choices.

State of JS will be coming out shortly so you can still take the survey here.

SQL Join Hands 🤝

We always hear about SQL Joins: Too many joins affects performance, but it's also one of the best features of relational databases. Get an overview of what SQL joins are and what they do with this article.

Why Separation Is Good 🖖

No this isn't another pandemic piece. Instead, it's a brief overview of why having HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is important. This idea behind separation of concerns has been a pillar to good software for a long time. Enjoy the read.

Deno 1.6 🦕

My favourite thing from 2020 had a big month. With the release of 1.6 you can build self contained, standalone binaries. The deno compile command can build your Deno projects into completely standalone executables. At ZTM we already updated our Deno course with this latest feature!

Cool Ideas Worth Checking 🧠

Ever wondered to yourself in the middle of the night... "What would happen if Github and Ethereum had a baby?" If you have, you need to get out more. Anyway, here is a cool idea (still very new) of a decentralized code workspace for you and your friends.

What about this one? Web App Specification Language. A programming language for building web apps with less code. Think of it as a new file format .wasl.

Interesting Question Of The Month 🕺

Why is a link in an email more dangerous than a link from a web search? I mean at the end of the day, they are the same thing right? Think about this before you see the answer. I learned something new reading this one.

Goodbye Google Fonts 🎼

Google Fonts resources will be redownloaded for every website, regardless it being cached on the CDN. The takeaway? Self-host your fonts for better performance. The old performance argument is not valid anymore.

Building An Ecommerce App Is Hard 🧗‍♂️

Don't let online tutorials fool you. If you want to build an ecommerce app from scratch, it's a lot harder than you might think. There is a reason pre build software/APIs/libraries exist. It is because most complex apps that do more than display information need proper planning and understanding of the system. This is an excellent read to understand how things can get complex and you should really think about your program/system before building it.

Cloudflare Has Entered The Chat 🏄‍♀️

Cloudflare just came out with privacy-first, lightweight, accurate web analytics—for free. Think Google Analytics but probably much better. Check out their new web analytics here.

Import On Interaction Pattern 🦦

A new... well not really new, as I feel that this has been around and available, but at least now it has a name. Lazy-load non-critical resources when a user interacts with UI requiring it to improve performance. This is how to do it.

JavaScript Tricks 💡

This is really cool: Conditional JavaScript, only download when it is appropriate to do so.

Finally, if you missed it, here are 25 interesting things to learn about JavaScript this Christmas. I know I am late on this, but the articles are well written.

How To Hack Facebook 🌋

This person got $7,500 from Facebook for discovering a bug that could have had some big consequences. Here is how he did it. Shameless self promotion: if you are interested in how things like these can be done we released a new course Complete Ethical Hacking Bootcamp: Zero to Mastery.

Bye Bye AngularJS 💁‍♂️

The original front end framework that started it all (kind of) will get one final release: 1.7. After the release of 1.7, the team does not intend to merge any feature or fix that will require even a minor breaking change. So you should definitely stop using it and migrate to the new Angular.

DRY is a Tradeoff 🛀

DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself is frequently touted as a principle of software development. "Copy-pasta" is the derisive term applied to a violation of it, tying together the concept of copying code and pasta as description of software development bad practices (see also spaghetti code).

It is so uniformly reviled that some people call DRY a "principle" that you should never violate. Indeed, some linters even detect copy-paste so that it can never sneak into the code. But copy-paste is not a comic-book villain, and DRY does not come bedecked in primary colors to defeat it. Read the full article here.

React Hooks Beef 🐄

If you are a regular reader of this monthly newsletter, you have been bombarded with my biased opinion of React Hooks and how they are not the greatest (don't send me hate mail). This month and article came out that looks back at the past 2 years since the React Hooks announcement. Finally, read this article which prevented me from writing another article (it does a much better job than I would have) of why Hooks isn't that great.

To balance things out, you should remember that React is still a great choice, and nobody has gotten fired from choosing React.

Centering in CSS 🧗🎯

Everything you wanted to know about centering in CSS. The hardest problem for programmers besides caching and naming things.

No More Cookies 🍪

In a big move that I believe many companies will follow, Github has removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting their website does not send any information to third-party analytics services. This means no more cookie banner from Github to comply with GDPR.

New Libraries and Tools 🗿

Just because we had a ton of these this month, I've added them into this section. Check out these shiny new/interesting things:

Ruby 3.0.0 was just released!
Chat with others on VS Code
Guess what this does: Mannequin.js
Not new, but you should probably stop using TravisCI unless you want to pay for it
React Hot Toast
Next time you are debating between javascript libraries, use this tool

News Around the World 🗺

Probably one of the biggest hacks this decade happened and we are still finding out the implications of this attack: Highly Evasive Attacker Leverages SolarWinds Supply Chain to Compromise Multiple Global Victims With SUNBURST Backdoor. The company that discovered this attack was also hacked. The bad news is that SolarWind customers are really important and big companies/government agencies. Expect more to come out around this story in the coming months.
Fusion energy device sets a record by running for 20 seconds

Big Tech News 🏢

Big news this month in the tech world is all of the anti trust cases that are happening. Facebook is in the worst position as the biggest antitrust case in a generation has been compared to the years-long lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998. Google is also in trouble. Even Chinese company, Alibaba, is in trouble.
The big deal in the tech world is the new M1 chip from Apple. Because it is a new type of chip, this means a lot of software products need to adjust their software to work on this new chip, including the popular Homebrew tool. Expect more and more software to be M1 compatible in the coming months. M1 chip is making so many waves that even Amazon is bringing macOS to its AWS and is putting Mac minis in the cloud. If you are an Apple fan boy, here are the top 20 apps from the 2020 App Store. One last Apple news: for the first time in a million years Apple actually release a tutorial for something. Learn to use SwiftUI and Xcode by building an app.
Big news out of Amazon who is able to offer Strong Consistency in their S3 storage buckets. For those not in the know, that is a very hard problem they have just solved. Read more about it here. They also announced AWS Amplify Admin UI. Think of it as Firebase from AWS, but much better (apparently). They also announced they want to train 29 Million people to work in the cloud (THEIR cloud). Super random but Amazon even has a Map feature now like Apple and Google maps.
Salesforce just acquired Slack for $27.7Billion. Umm what!?
Apple and Cloudflare developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.
Google had a big outage across their products and people lost their minds.
Like many other internet firms, Twitter has decided to migrate core services from its own data centers to a public cloud infrastructure on AWS.
Hyundai has just bought Boston Dynamics.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Your childhood dream come true.
The Chrome Plugin you didn't think you needed until now.
You can now do this with Webflow.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

An interesting piece on the idea of a Semantic Web and the data that flows around it. A long shot of an idea but it makes you think about a possible future. This is an idea developed by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of HTML and WWW) who coined the concept of a “Semantic Web”, where the web can be considered more a global database that computer systems could understand rather than a series of separate web pages. Worth exploring the idea.

One more for this month, because it is an important reminder.

Trick of the Month 🌗

How to write an effective developer resume.
Style your readme using CSS with this simple trick.
You can now pick your theme for Github.

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By the way, my full-time job is to teach people how to code and get hired 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.

Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀

Andrei Neagoie