Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀

37th 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 July 2021 as a Web Developer…

State Of Development 🧘🏻‍♂️

These surveys are always fun to keep an eye on evolving trends in the industry. This report presents the combined results of the fifth annual Developer Ecosystem Survey conducted by JetBrains. 31,743 developers from 183 countries responded with data points.

What I found interesting:

• JavaScript is the most popular language.
• The top-5 languages developers are planning to adopt or migrate to are Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, Python, and Rust.

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. More free icons than you will ever need
2. AI image resizer
3. Mesh gradients for your next project
4. Copy-paste TailwindCSS buttons
5. Open source illustrations
6. Scenic background animations pack
7. Glassmorphism CSS Generator
8. 3D illustration pack just for you

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 36 of the previous issues (that's 3 years of Web Developer Monthly 🥳!). That's a joke. Don't do that!

Github Copilot 🧑🏽‍✈️

The big news this month was the release of Github Copilot with the help of OpenAI (The one's who made GPT-3). GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, the new AI system created by OpenAI. GitHub Copilot understands significantly more context than most code assistants. So, whether it’s in a docstring, comment, function name, or the code itself, GitHub Copilot uses the context you’ve provided and synthesizes code to match. It's like pair programming with a robot. Don't worry, developer jobs aren't going away because of AI. As with most things, this is still new and it will never write code perfectly.

React News 💎

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

• An opinionated guide to setting up the architecture for a new React application.

• An overview of React State Management Techniques in 2021. I still love Redux.

• Freelance React Developer Checklist: Essentially this checklist makes your onboarding as a React freelance developer more seamless when entering a new project and team, because before a company can hire you as a React freelancer, both sides can talk through this checklist to get their requirements aligned.

• 5 Code Smells React Beginners Should Avoid.

• What are state machines? How does it relate to React? This is an excellent read to learn this general principle that goes beyond just using React.

Temporal Shmerporal 🧠

Date, JavaScript’s current date time API is infamously difficult to use. The ECMAScript proposal Temporal is a new and better date time API and currently at stage 3... so it should be coming soon. This blog post will show you how Temporal works and how to use it. You automatically get cool points for using the word "Temporal" instead of "Date" in everyday conversation now.

Flutter vs React Native 🤝

If you're wondering why we are talking about mobile app development in a web development newsletter, I think you need to stop being so uptight.

Everyone's favourite argument right after React vs Everybody is here with another breakdown. Which should you chose between Flutter and React Native for mobile development? Find out here.

History of Graphics on the Web ✍️

In this article, you will look at the fascinating evolution of graphics in browsers from the prehistoric days of the early browsers. You will start with simple images and make your way to the vast graphics offerings of modern browsers. Along the way, you will meet long-forgotten friends like Java Applets and ActiveX controls as well as newer friends like SVG, HTML 5 Canvas, and WebGL. Enjoy!

Software Architecture Books 📚

Like books? Like Software Architecture? Then boy do I have something for you.

Petite Vue 🗜

petite-vue is an alternative distribution of Vue optimized for progressive enhancement. It provides the same template syntax and reactivity mental model with standard Vue. However, it is specifically optimized for "sprinkling" small amount of interactions on an existing HTML page rendered by a server framework. Check it out here.

Deno News 🦕

It's time to run deno upgrade again! Deno 1.12 is out!

Oh and did you hear about Deno Deploy? Deno Deploy is a multi-tenant JavaScript engine running in 25 data centers across the world. The classic model of: build open-source tech, then make money hosting applications built on that open-source tech.

Indiepen 👨‍🎤

Next time you are writing a blog post and you want to embed some live (editable) code into the blog post, then you should use Indiepen. It's like codepen, but because it's focused on privacy, you don't need to display a cookie banner to use it. Check out how it works here.

State of Web Workers 🌊

The web is single-threaded (Thanks JavaScript!). This makes it increasingly hard to write smooth and responsive apps. Web Workers have a bad rep, but can be an important and useful tool in any web developer’s toolbelt for the kinds of problems where you need a little something "extra". Let’s get up to speed on Workers for the Web in 2021 and when you should use them!

100% in CSS 🦋

Here is a classic question that you probably never asked yourself but now that I mention it here, you will read about and think: "wow that's really cool and will remember it for the next 7 days and then forget about it again".

Speaking of CSS, this is an excellent read on things you "wish" you had learned when starting with CSS.

Weekend Project Ideas 🧰

16 of 30 Google results contain SQL injection vulnerabilities... umm WHAT? In this weekend project, I want you to take a look at this article, learn about SQL injections and identify why these 16 results are a big NO NO if you are a developer. It's something you will take with you for the rest of your career and will give you a good understanding that just because you googled it or saw it on Stackoverflow, it doesn't mean it's good code.

How To Build A Data Team 🤹‍♀️

This is a super interesting read for those that ever wonder what a Data Team really means at a company. What do people do with all of that data? Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story.

call(), apply(), bind() 🎱

Although it is becoming less common to see these methods used in JavaScript with the introduction of the arrow function, these 3 methods used to be an interviewer's favourite topic to see if you truly understood JavaScript. Learn all about these 3 mystical methods and how they teach you about the internals of our favourite language.

npm audit Hate 🥊

An opinionated piece from everyone's favourite developer to retweet. Is npm audit broken? You decide.

/events not Webhooks 🏌️

Webhooks are a supplement to many APIs. With a webhook system in place, System B can register to receive notifications about certain changes to System A. When a change occurs, System A pushes the change to System B, usually in the form of making an HTTP POST request. However, is there a better way?

Good Comment, Bad Comment 💥

While there are many resources to help programmers write better code, such as books and static analyzers, there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than no comment at all. Here are some rules to help you achieve a happy medium.

JavaScript at ⏳

With the release of V8 engine 9.2 (that thing that Chrome browsers use to read your JavaScript), you can now use the .at() method on array types. It brings in a new functionality that many Python programmers already enjoyed: the -1 index! Read about it here.

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:

• Ember is still around and Ember 4.0 is here

• Dinero.js: Create, calculate, and format money in JavaScript and TypeScript.

News Around the World 🗺

• U.S. companies have been hit by another round of cyber attacks. If you are interested in why this is becoming more and more common in our world, listen to this amazing podcast episode: The Lazarus Heist

• The latest on the "facial recognition is creeping me out": Tencent now has this

• NSO Group which is pretty controversial for creating the Pegasus spyware to spy on citizens just got hacked.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Facebook is going to pay creators $1 billion to try and compete with lowering of market share to TikTok, Youtube, Snap, etc... By the way, did you know Facebook uses MySQL for their massive data storage? Learn how they are migrating to MySQL 8.0

• Microsoft's Windows 11 is a big deal. But did you know you need something called a TPMS to be able to use Windows 11? Lear what that is here... it's super interesting.

• Not much big tech news this month other than that billionaires are going to space wearing cowboy hats now.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Why was ! chosen for negation? Learn why here.

• export default thing is different to export { thing as default }. Learn it all here.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

How do you work hard? What is working hard?

Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are.

In other words, you need to work efficiently. Once you read the post above, read this.

The secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place, we must be sure that people learn this, and never forget the order: Learning is naturally the consequence of doing.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Learn SQL quick with this interactive tutorial

• Cool new VS Code theme: Serendipity

See you next month!

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.