Web Developer Monthly 💻🚀

23rd 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 May as a Web Developer…

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StackOverflow 2020 Survey 🎉

This is probably the best developer survey that comes out once a year and a great indication of trends to watch out for in the coming months. This year's survey results do not disappoint. I will be writing about some of the interesting patterns soon, but for now, check out the results here. What are your thoughts?

Quantum JavaScript 🕳

Putting the word Quantum in front of anything makes it 10x more impressive and that is a fact. This is the same case here... learn Q using JavaScript in your browser and learn about quantum programming. Don't let your head explode.

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. Create all the favicons you ever wanted
2. 2000+ beautiful icons to use for your next project
3. Is your website fast or slow? Learn the answer
4. Share pretty images of your code
5. 90s fonts for that retro look
6. A new code editor on the block: lite
7. A font that censors f**** bad words.
8. Free wacky illustrations for you. And another one.
9. One word domains because everyone is doing a tech startup.
10. Neumorphism UI. I don't know what that means but it looks nice

React News 💎

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

• Are you bored out of your mind during this quarantine? I guarantee that you aren't bored enough to answer hundreds of React Interview questions 😆. However, it is still a useful resource for you to have.

• React Fast Refresh is something we have talked about already in this newsletter. With the recent version of React, we now have React Fast Refresh that was first introduced in React Native and it is the (better) replacement of Hot Reload that sometimes wouldn't work as expected.

• Next.js 9.4 came out and they have Fast Refresh in there now too!

• Fun little library to create interactive graphs and flow charts.

• Jest 26, everyone's favourite testing framework came out with some major changes to lower the number of dependencies. Also check out this amazing GUI project to run your Jest dashboard.

• You know what we don't have enough of? State Management Libraries in React. But hold on. This one has the backing of Facebook. Pretty interesting way in which it works.

• Nothing new here but a good reminder of React best practices. Here are 15 React best practice tips.

• Also, React Europe conference happened. Instead of watching every single talk, here is someone that summarizes everything for you.

Not Another Roadmap 🗺️

So I was thinking this path month... "you know what we don't have enough of? Opinions on what you need to get started in the Web Development industry!" (yes that is sarcasm). Anyway, I threw my hat in the mix and decided to create a roadmap of what I think you need to know to get into the industry in 2020. Enjoy my ramblings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57GuRoJ5Bfw

How About That Vue 3? 🔋

Is Vue 3 here yet? Nope.....buuutttttt:

Evan You, the creator of Vue wrote a great piece explaining the changes for Vue 3 and some of the things that they had to do to move Vue into the future: A really well written piece.

Welcome To Deno Park 🦕

This is HUGE. So huge that I am going against my own advice of not jumping on the bandwagon too early when a new tool comes out... I'm coming out with a Deno course this week!

Deno is a JavaScript runtime created by the same person who created Node.js. This time, using modern tooling, and improving on some of Node's shortcomings. I'm betting Deno will be a big player in the coming years. Until my course comes out, here is a nice rundown of how Deno works, and if you have extra time, read this.

UPDATE: As promised, I just released my brand new course, Deno: The Complete Guide Zero to Mastery with new ZTM instructor Adam Odziemkowski, who is also an actual Deno contributor!

Best Way To Learn SQL 👮‍♂️

If only all tutorials and lessons were this fun. You can try your hand at using SQL to solve some crime mysteries with this interactive game tutorial. Welcome to SQLPD

To Micro Or Not To Micro 🔬

Another great piece by a large company turning their back on the microservices architecture. It's always good to see both sides of the coin and realizing that the idea of "auto scaling" does come with drawbacks.

Where Did Recursion Come From? 🌿

A nice little history lesson on how recursion got into the computer programming world. A little bit of knowledge that is not super useful, but still an interesting read for those that like these sort of things.

Never Leave Github Again 🌊

NPM, Visual Studio Code, Github. Microsoft is on a tear with the web development world. Now they have introduced a feature to use a code editor straight on Github so that you never leave your favourite website again. Get the full Visual Studio Code experience without leaving GitHub.

PS. They also just opened up a beta version of code scanning which looks promising (never push your secrets to Github by mistake again!)

Fundamentals To Improve Performance 🌪

It's easy to get lost with all of the latest and greatest features and tricks to improve performance using a popular frontend library, over-engineered bundling and configurations, and excessive profiling. But at the end of the day, some fundamentals that haven't changed since the 90s may be your best bet. Enjoy reading this.

Single Line Of JavaScript Goodness 🎻

A great collection of single line JavaScript utilities. I highly recommend this resource to try and improve your Javascript chops and learning some new tricks along the way. Remember, the fundamentals don't change so it's always a good investment of your time to learn pure javascript.

The Big Turning Point ☄️

An interesting trend to keep an eye out on the web. Facebook did their big rewrite to improve their website which lead to a heated discussion on Hackernews: was the re-write a good direction to take? You can read the modern improvements they made on their blog post here.

Along this line, an interesting post came out that received a lot of attention about the direction that the web is going in with bloated client side Javascript code. Even Dan Abramov (who works on React) had to agree and I expect big changes coming in the future (where we combine the best of Client Side and Server Side rendering).

My Big Guess 🔮

Kite Autocomplete for JavaScript just came out. THIS is where I think the future is when it comes to the no-code/low-code movement. Programmers and Developers aren't being replaced by tools that let you drag and drop to make apps. Instead, we are going to be using AI and Machine Learning to become better programmers. This is the future (just my opinion). Doing a lot of predictions in this month's newsletter eh? Sorry!

React Native Everywhere 🗝

React Native is going to have a big change in 2020. With Microsoft investing heavily in the project, you can now use React Native not only for mobile phones, but also for Windows and MacOS apps. This is pretty incredible.

Don't Spam With Email 🛠

Ok, maybe this isn't something you work with day to day, but I bet a lot of people don't realize the reputation that comes with sending emails. If you are ever working on a product/startup that requires signups and sending emails to your customers, take charge and make sure that you use best practices (you may get a raise for telling your boss about this).

Big Changes To Chrome 🛵

Everyone's favourite browser (ok, maybe not favourite, but definitely the most used browser) had some big updates. First, a new feature that lets you group tabs.

More big news: Google is going to start ranking pages based on the "experience" that they offer. You better start caring about performance a lot more now if you want good SEO.

While we are talking about chrome, here is a neat trick to copy the CSS of an element you like on a page.

A look back at JavaScript 🖋

An interesting piece talking about the features in JavaScript that we can forget about and pretend like they never existed.

Gif vs Looping Videos 🎞

This is something new that I learned this month. Did you know that Gifs are extremely large in size and you can get better results by using the <video> html tag and looping? Check it out

News Around the World 🗺

• The sale of the .org registry to a private entity has been put on a hold after a loud community outcry. If you want more background on this, read it here.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Amazon had a rollercoaster of a month. One of their Engineering VPs left Amazon due to their handling of some employees and wrote a public piece about them that went viral. Do you ever get confused by 4870127340127 services that AWS offers? Here is a resource that explains each one of them in a single line.

• Facebook's iOS sdk crashed a lot of iphone apps that were using Facebook inside their app (like for Facebook logins). It made a lot of people freak out. They also launched a new chatbot that it claims is able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality... too bad they used Reddit to train the machine learning model. Also, Facebook bought Giphy for 400 million dollars. Yes... you read that right. The most insane value for a business that nobody probably thought would make any money.

• Twitter will start allowing employees to work remotely from now on. The world of tech is changing with more and more remote work. Expect many companies to follow.

• Big news out of Apple as they expand the Swift programming language to support Windows and Linux.

• SoftBank and its Vision Fund isn't doing too well.

• MongoDB is in hot water after a researcher claims that they don't have the data consistency claims that they make.

• Research out of Google shows that 70% of security problems on the web are due to memory safety. This explains why languages like Rust are becoming more popular instead of C/C++ for low level programming.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Listen to a song at the same time with a complete stranger in the world.

Big month for space travel.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

To tie into the section above (The Big Turning Point) there is a shift coming in the Javascript world. This article does a great job of articulating where the ecosystem was and where it is heading. I tend to agree with this viewpoint.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Next time you are looking for a job, maybe you should check the HTTP headers of that company website.

• A quick tip on how not to set a website user's language based on location.

• A search engine just for developers

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.