Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

70th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter

If it’s your first time here, welcome, keep reading. If you're a long time reader, welcome back, you can skip to the next section to dive right into this month's newsletter.

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 interesting problems.

One of the hardest parts? Staying up-to-date with the constantly evolving ecosystem.

Of course you want to be a top-performing web developer, coder, programmer, software developer, but you don’t have time to select from 100s of articles, videos and podcasts coming out every 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 2024 as a Web Developer…

History of CSS + Web Design 🐦‍🔥

A great fun read that gives you insight into the beginning of CSS and how it has evolved over the years. I love articles like these that gives you the experience of what happened in the past even if you may be new to web development.

A must read.

React News 💎

React... it's still mostly everyone's favourite frontend library. What crazy things have they been up to?

1. React Server Components in a nutshell for those that want to know what's going on.

2. Build faster with Wedges. An open-source collection of UI components for React.

3. React 19 doesn't have a release date yet, but it will be coming this year, and they just released the beta so you can test it out. How can you get your codebase ready for the upcoming changes? Here is how.

JSR is Here 🛹

Over the past years, new package managers like yarn and pnpm have emerged, enhancing how packages are downloaded. However, the npm package registry, a cornerstone of the JavaScript ecosystem, has barely evolved.

Its last notable update was a “files” tab added years ago.

The JavaScript language, known for its vibrant evolution, seems paradoxically mired in a distribution model that hasn’t kept pace... so the Deno team (founded by that guy that created Node), has a new solution: JSR.

Bonus: Deno vs. Node vs. Bun.

Svelte, Solid, and Qwik ⛹️

No, this isn't how you describe your younger self. We're talking about front end development!

Here is a great 3 part article describing some of the less popular front end frameworks/libraries like Svelte, Solid and Qwik: Frontend development beyond React.

Weekend Project Idea 🧪

Atlassian released pragmatic-drag-and-drop. A tool used by the most popular products that use the Drag n' Drop: Trello, Jira and Confluence.

It's your turn to use this library, and build something fun this weekend!

Centering Things 🖼

Do you know what the hardest problem in Computer Science is? We, as a civilization, forgot how to center things. This is a fun read.

CSS Masonry is Coming? ⚒

"If you’ve been making websites for years, you know how frustrating it was to lay out a web page with CSS floats.

Managing sizes and placement was tedious and time consuming. Being creative was often impossible.

CSS Grid greatly eased that pain with Grid Level 1 in 2017, and now with Grid Level 2, aka Subgrid. But even with the powerful CSS of today, not every layout imaged by designers is possible.

In fact, when CSS Grid shipped, one of the most commonly asked questions was: “how do I write CSS to accomplish a masonry layout?”

Sadly, for the last seven years the answer has been — you can’t."

A great discussion around this proposal to add a new CSS Masonry feature.

Want to go super deep learning CSS? Check out this insanely comprehensive CSS course.

HTML Attrs vs DOM Props 🪢

Did you notice how hip the above abbreviations are?

Attributes and properties are fundamentally different things. You can have an attribute and property of the same name set to different values.

HTML attributes and DOM properties are not the same.

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...

• Bun 1.1 is out and it's making some waves! One big update is that now you can run it on Windows.

• NextJS 14.2 is here!

• PSA: this is why you should update your jQuery (and all other libraries for that matter).

• React Native 0.74 is here - Yoga 3.0, Bridgeless New Architecture, and more.

• NodeJS 22 is now available under LTS! The cool feature that is no longer experimental is the --watch command.

News Around the World 🗺

• In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has asked the public for comments on “Open-Weight AI Models”—models like LLaMa, Stable Diffusion, and Mixtral—which are freely distributed to the public. They are considering blocking access these models in order to prevent abuse. Is that good or bad?

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta released Meta Llama 3. Now available with both 8B and 70B pretrained and instruction-tuned versions to support a wide range of applications... it's their answer to the OpenAI / Google battle that have "closed" models.

• Meta also announced the new Meta Horizons OS which powers their AR/VR goggles. They are trying to do what Windows did back in the day (and then Apple) by hoping everyone will use their OS for AR/VR needs.

• Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinating read of an operating system that was written entirely in 8086 assembly code nearly 45 years ago. This month, Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Really cool concept for a website, plus who doesn't love Mario Kart stats.

• Isn't it awesome that you can build such a thing on the web?

• Infinitely scrollable town: Infinitetown

• Another impressive web project.... lot's of them this month eh?

Is Prompt Engineering A Thing? 🧝🏻

We explore this topic in our newest course. Turns out, like with most things in life, there are smart ways and bad ways of using a tool.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Programming Is Mostly Thinking. Did you know that?

Pretend you have a really great programming day.

*You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don't get distracted or interrupted much, don't have to do a bunch of status or time reporting, and you put in a good six hours of serious programming.

I want to review your work in the morning, so I print out a diff of your day's work before going home.

Sadly, overnight the version control system crashes and they have to recover from the previous day's backup. You have lost an entire day's work.

If I give you the diff, how long will it take you to type the changes back into the code base and recover your six-hours' work?

Programming is 11/12ths Thinking... and I agree with this article. I highly recommend this read.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• A.I. pair programming in your terminal!

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.