[April 2023] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

58th 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 web development newsletter is focused on keeping you up-to-date with the industry, without wasting your valuable time. I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts and videos of the month.

Think 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 April 2023 as a Web Developer…

console.time Trick 🥷

A lot of people forget about console.time and how useful it could be in analyzing the performance of your code.

Read this great blog post on how this one developer used this trick to analyze their code, and make their app 1000x faster with a 1 line change.

React News 💎

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

The new era of React is here. Learning React in 2023 is not the easiest endeavour. While we had lots of stability since the release of React Hooks in 2019, the tide is turning again, and it may be a more volatile shift than it has been with React Hooks. In this article, you get to compare the two angles on how to learn React in 2023: the library way and the framework way.
Get caught up with all the new trends/thingys in React world. Here is how to build a blog with Next.js 13 and React Server Components.

AI Playground 👩‍🚀

Vercel just came out with a fun little thing you can play with. An AI playground for you to try out all these new Language Learning Models (LLMs) and compare their answers to one another.

Chrome Ships WebGPU 👩‍💻

After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU which allows high-performance 3D graphics and data-parallel computation on the web... this could be the beginning of something great for web graphics.

Speaking of WebGPU, check out this cool library: Babylon.js.

Development Trends in 2023 👩‍🎤

Instead of 10, 20 or 30 things you 'need to know' this year, Aldo spoke with a number of our ZTM Instructors and got them to share their most important web development trends that you should know for 2023 (both blog and video form available).

Angular Signals 🛰

The Angular team requested community comments on their plan to adopt signals as a reactive primitive for Angular. The community responded and they are going ahead with this big change.

See the results here.

Ruby on Rails Love 🎢

Although the hype of Ruby on Rails is no longer as it was in the early 2000s with companies like Twitter leading the charge, Ruby on Rails deserves some love.

It's one of the best ways to get up and running with an MVP and the language itself is so pleasant to use.

Did you know that Github was built with it?

Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.

Read about it here.

How Sharding Works 🧇

If you’ve used Google or YouTube, you’ve probably accessed sharded data. Sharding helps you scale out your database by storing partitions of your data across multiple servers instead of putting everything on a single giant one.

This post will walk through how database sharding works, how to think about implementing your own sharded database, and some useful tools out there that can help, with a particular focus on MySQL and Postgres.

Do you like all this Database stuff? Then learn SQL by playing a game.

What Frameworks Do We Use? 🛍️

Netlify dug into their data to provide us insights on what Web Developers are using on their hosting platform.

On Netlify overall, the top 4 frameworks accounted for 40%+ of all users. People often use more than one framework at a time, but 27% of Netlify users (where we can identify what framework they're using) are using create-react-app, sometimes in addition to other frameworks.

The results are interesting, check them out here.

Fun Project of the Week 🧰

This is a great one to add to your portfolio: An LLM playground you can run on your laptop. Use this to wow everyone and show how smart you are.

A Wild New Browser Appears 🤿

This is cool: The Mullvad Browser is a privacy-focused web browser developed in a collaboration between Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project.

It’s designed to minimize tracking and fingerprinting. You could say it’s a Tor Browser to use without the Tor Network. Instead, you can use it with a trustworthy VPN. The idea is to provide one more alternative – beside the Tor Network – to browse the internet with more privacy.

Cheetah the Coding Interview 🐆

Is this cheating? Or is this just being a good problem solver?

Whisper & GPT-based app for crushing remote Software engineering interviews. If you get a job with this... do let us know 😛.

How Load Balancing Works ⚖️

Most websites that you visit have some sort of load balancing in order to not crash their app when too many users visit at once. So how does it all work?

We cover this topic in our courses, but if you're looking for a brief overview, here it is.

Spinning Diagrams with CSS 💈

Don't let the mathy diagram at the beginning of this post intimidate you. This is a cool little CSS trick you can do with any diagram. Enjoy.

New Libraries and Tools 🗿

There are a ton of shiny new libraries and tools every month which is why I have this dedicated section for them...

NextJS 13.3 is out! It adds: File-Based Metadata API, Dynamic Open Graph Images, Static Export for App Router, and Parallel Routes and Interception.
KV.js: Advanced in-memory caching module for JavaScript... Think of it like Redis but with JavaScript.
Storybook 7.0 is out and about!
Vite 4.3 is out and they say it's even faster. Ain't nobody got time to test that so let's just take their word for it.
Node.js v20 is out with some cool experimental features that Deno came up with first.

News Around the World 🗺

Be careful if you use "JavaScript". Papa Oracle might come knocking at your door.
Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search.

Big Tech News (AKA ChatGPT News) 🏢

Twitter is sharing the inner workings of the algorithm they use. On April fools, they even did this one funny thing.
Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games (Fortnite)... this is a big win for Apple.
AI battle is continuing. Microsoft is building its own artificial intelligence chips for powering the large-language models responsible for understanding and generating humanlike language.
Google announced the release of Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.
Keep an eye on this new way of using GPT "agents": Auto-GPT.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Robots are taking over the world one piano at a time.
Can water solve a maze?
Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station.
This is how you can get creative and play with the scrolling of your website. Genius idea.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

You may have a love/hate relationship with ChatGPT and according to a recent survey we did, not many of you think it will replace your job (I agree).

However, it is something you should pay attention to and stay on top of because your other developer friends are learning to use it. So while ChatGPT itself isn't going to replace you... a good developer that learns how to 10x their output using ChatGPT totally could.

I recommend reading this article: Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting.

A lot of people who claim to be doing prompt engineering today are actually just blind prompting.

"Blind Prompting" is a term used to describe the method of creating prompts with a crude trial-and-error approach paired with minimal or no testing and a very surface level knowledge of prompting.

Blind prompting is not prompt engineering, and Prompt Engineering might make you a better developer.

Finally, watch this video: How LLMs like ChatGPT are Revolutionizing Software Engineering.

Trick of the Month 🌗

Run cron jobs with JavaScript!
Phind: The AI search engine for developers... use it like this.

Thanks for reading!

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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 our popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.