Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀

32nd 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 curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, 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?

Let's dive in. Here's what you missed in February 2021 as a Web Developer…

Architecture.md 🦾

An interesting idea around including this type of file in all of your projects. The idea? As the name suggest, this file should describe the high-level architecture of the project. Keep it short: every recurring contributor will have to read it. Additionally, the shorter it is, the less likely it will be invalidated by some future change. This is the main rule of thumb for ARCHITECTURE — specify only things which are unlikely to frequently change. Don’t try to keep it synchronized with code. Instead, revisit it a couple of times a year.

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. Best CSS style around
2. This has been posted before, but hey, here it is again: Public APIs
3. Who doesn't love some SVG waves?
4. Glassmorphism is the new GME
5. Epic CSS Transitions
6. Find tech jobs with relocation packages
7. Haven't tried this, but love what it promises: Ponicode
8. Yet another pattern generator
9. Beautiful code snippets for you
10. Free avatar pack for your projects
11. If you love free stuff... then...

For those of you who don't know, the ZTM team and I list our all-time best free resources here for you. Or... you can go back and read all 31 of the previous issues (wow, we're almost at 3 years of WDM!) of Web Developer Monthly. That's a joke. Don't do that!

JavaScript Memory Management 🧠

Most of the time, you can probably get by fine not knowing anything about memory management as a JavaScript developer. After all, the JavaScript engine handles this for you. At one point or another, though, you'll encounter problems, like memory leaks, that you can only solve if you know how memory allocation works.

In this article, you will learn how memory allocation and garbage collection works and how you can avoid some common memory leaks.

React News 💎

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

• Should you really use useMemo in React? Let’s Find Out.

• Looks like even Amazon is all aboard the React train. They now have a new tutorial on their website: Building server-side rendering for React in AWS Lambda. Don't worry, they haven't forgotten about Vue 3 either: Amplify JavaScript releases support for Vue 3

• The super duper deep dive into styled-components

• A reminder that nobody has ever/will ever get through this entire list of awesome React things.

• How to create React components with TypeScript.

New Browser Has Entered The Chat 👾

Beam has raised $9.5m to take on some of the biggest browser companies in the world like Microsoft, Google and Mozilla, by creating a new web browser. Looks like they will be using Chromium underneath the hood. “It’s basically a cultural search engine.”

No More Frontend 😿

An interesting opinion piece of a frontend developer who has had enough and wants to focus on backend development: "I suppose with the increase of complexity in what we want to achieve on the web the stack to achieve it with has had to also increase in complexity. For me, personally, it's too much. I want to have a personal life and not have to spend my nights reading up on some new flavour of .js in fear that if I don't I would soon be made irrelevant. I don't want to learn nor use a million different tools. I don't want to know a bit about everything and a lot about nothing."

Interesting Question Of The Month 🕺

This should be changed to QUESTIONS of the month, because there are 7. Can you answer these 7 JavaScript closures interview questions? Share your results!

Deno Fanboy 🦕

My heavy bias towards Deno must be present in all newsletters, so here it is: An interview with the creator of Deno: Ryan Dhal. Enjoy!

Google Proposes New Sandbox 🧨

Google is proposing a new idea to keep advertising on the web but with a more privacy focus in mind. How? Interest-based advertising. They call it Federated Learning of Cohorts (uh la la, sounds fancy). It proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This approach effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.

Functions As Callbacks 📞

A simple message in this one - Don't use functions as callbacks unless they're designed for it. Jake always has great articles and this one does not disappoint.

Weekend Project Ideas 🧰

I know this is a web developer newsletter, but knowing Linux is still a very important skill even if all you do all day is build super functional React components using your mechanical keyboard. I present to you what you should do this weekend: Getting better at Linux with 10 mini-projects

While you are at it, here is a visual guide to SSH. Why not?

Want to go down the rabbit hole even further? How about learning about Computer Networks?

What CSS Can Do Now 🖼

CSS has evolved a lot over the years. Here are all the cool new things you can do with it now. Discover masonry layout, :is selector, clamp(), ch and ex units, updated text decoration, and a few other useful CSS properties.

The HYPE-est Article 🤺

This article wins the award for the most click bait article title of the year. I'm calling it. Double Your React Coding Speed With This Simple Trick. I dare you not to click it.

A Chit Chat With Eich 🎟

Say that title fast 5 times. Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave and you can enjoy hearing him talk about all things he has done here or watch below. It's a pretty good interview.

"JSON" : "YAML" 🚴 🚴‍♂️

Between Eleventy, GitHub Actions, and a recent foray into serverless, I'm using a more YAML. And I don't understand it. This article breaks things down into nice JSON that we all understand.

TypeScript Style Guide 🎽

Umm, I mean the title explains it all, here is an excellent TypeScript style guide.

All Z-Index 🌿

If you do the above in a German accent, it instantly becomes funnier. If you thought there isn't much to know about z-index, well, this article tries to prove you wrong by going deep into all things z-index.

Total Cookie Protection 🍪

No, this isn't the name of the next fad diet. It's the new feature Firefox is introducing. Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site. Read the announcement here.

What's Next For Next? 🍾

Check out this interview with the creator of Next.js. Next.js is picking up steam and is growing in popularity... a Next.js course may be coming soon from ZTM (hint hint).

Hardware On The Web 📻

A super interesting and fun read where you can discover all the ways you can access hardware devices of a user through the web. The goal of this guide is to help you pick the best API to communicate with a hardware device (e.g. webcam, microphone, etc.) on the web.

FANNG Engineer 🐄

What are the pros and cons of being a software engineer at a BIG tech company? It may not always be sunshine and rainbows. There may be benefits to being a technical lead at a less software intensive business. Read on.

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:

• Vite 2.0 created by Evan (that guy that created Vue) You is out and gaining a bit of traction. It's kind of like Snowpack which we featured in last month's newsletter.
• NPM 7 is generally available. It's the one with the new Workspaces feature and automatically installing peer dependencies.
• Vuex 4.0 is out. Think of it as Redux for Vue apps.
• Charts.css! Charts using CSS as the name suggests.
• Reshift! - Super cool tool. Use the free tier.

News Around the World 🗺

• Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update. A reminder that even popular apps aren’t always safe. Everything is broken 😭.

• A hacker tried to poison the water system in Florida.

• SolarWinds hack was 'largest and most sophisticated attack' ever: Microsoft president. We're finding out more about this big hack.

• NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars! (check this tweet)

Big Tech News 🏢

• Jeff Bezos is stepping down from Amazon so he can battle it out in space with Elon. On another note, Amazon came up with the best idea ever.

• Shocker of the month. Google shuts down another product: Stadia studios

• Microsoft team discovered a suuuuper interesting attack venue for hackers. Impersonating internal npm package names.

• Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design.

• LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) is building a gig marketplace to complete with Upwork and Fiver. Keep an eye on this one.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• 20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower. Why?

• China between 1910-1920 (Beijing - Peking).

• Waste away 1h and 30min while watching the earth.

• Apparently this is made with an array of 10 images going in a loop.

• Waste away hours playing with this one. See what happens when you draw a toothpick.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

When the legend, Martin Fowler speaks, we all must listen. For those that don't know, Martin has been around for a while and is one of the most respected programmers you will ever meet. His writings have had tremendous impact on the industry and his latest article gives a great insight into how smart people feel about Monolith vs Microservices. Follow his advice, and you won't be led astray.

If you're not sure what Monoliths, Microservices and Modules are, then you should read this first.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• View Github repos online using VS code in the browser. Here is the trick.

• Freeze your webcam to get out of endless Zoom meetings. You're welcome.

• zsh tricks to blow your mind.

• Your Github story in 3D.

See you next month everyone!

By the way, I 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 ZTM courses here.