[April 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 82nd issue of Web Developer Monthly!

If it’s your first time here, welcome, I like you already. If you want the full back story on the newsletter, head here.

The quick version: I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos from the world of web and software development.

Think the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the programming world. I give you the 20% that will get you 80% of the results.

If you're a long time reader, welcome back old friend.

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what you missed in April 2025 as a Web Developer…

MCP Hype Train 🚄

MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is the hot new standard behind how Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude, GPT, or Cursor integrate with tools and data.

It’s been described as the “USB-C for AI agents.” which doesn't really help anyone understand what it is. So here is a quick overview of what everyone is getting all hyped out about:

1. The “S” in MCP Stands for Security
2. Google has given up and pretty much everyone agrees on the MCP as the standard now
3. MCPs and the Future of AI

New Nue 🛸

Nue is a new web technology that sounds very interesting. Their tag line is: Apps lighter than a React button. Build ambitious, large-scale apps with a fraction of code. Sounds great but how do they do it?

Here is a good blog post describing what they do. Keep an eye on this space.

React News 💎

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

1. React Compiler is finally out! Well kind of, as a release candidate.

2. How the React reconciliation engine works. A good deep dive.

3. Fun little tutorial: build a simple AI chat app using React.js on Next.js and the OpenAI API. You'll learn how to set up an API route to send prompts to OpenAI and build a frontend that displays the conversation in real time.

4. Advanced React in the Wild - production case studies from ambitious web projects (2022–2025).

5. If you want to read a ton of words and you have the entire day available to you: JSX Over the Wire

Llama News 🫦

Meta had a big AI month with conferences and releases. The big announcement was the Llama4 herd, which will enable people to build multimodal experiences (open source). Here is the breakdown:

Llama 4 Models:
  - Both Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick use a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design with 17B active parameters each.
  - They are natively multimodal: text + image input, text-only output.
  - Key achievements include industry-leading context lengths, strong coding/reasoning performance, and improved multilingual capabilities.
  - Knowledge cutoff: August 2024.

  Llama 4 Scout:
  - 17B active parameters, 16 experts, 109B total.
  - Fits on a single H100 GPU (INT4-quantized).
  - 10M token context window
  - Outperforms previous Llama releases on multimodal tasks while being more resource-friendly.
  - Employs iRoPE architecture for efficient long-context attention.
  - Tested with up to 8 images per prompt.

  Llama 4 Maverick:
  - 17B active parameters, 128 experts, 400B total.
  - 1M token context window.
  - Not single-GPU; runs on one H100 DGX host or can be distributed for greater efficiency.
  - Outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on coding, reasoning, and multilingual tests at a competitive cost.
  - Maintains strong image understanding and grounded reasoning ability.

  Llama 4 Behemoth (Preview):
  - 288B active parameters, 16 experts, nearly 2T total.
  - Still in training; not yet released.
  - Exceeds GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM benchmarks (e.g., MATH-500, GPQA Diamond).
  - Serves as the “teacher” model for Scout and Maverick via co-distillation.

<select> Element Update 🪇

The very useful HTML element <select> got an update! From Chrome 135, web developers and designers can finally unite on an accessible, standardized and CSS styleable <select> element on the web. Check out some of the demos of what you can do now using just HTML & CSS.

Ps. how much do you love CSS? Well.... welcome to CSS hell.

The Best Programmers I Know 🎖

This is an excellent read that you shouldn't miss. Here are the great qualities of a programmer. It's easy to know these but can you actually practice them in your day-to-day work?

Google's Big Announcement for Fullstack 🪂

This is pretty big news from Google into the space that is really hot right now: AI coding environments. They are entering the race with the new Firebase Studio.

As a full stack AI workspace, Firebase Studio, tries to accelerates your entire development lifecycle with AI agents (Build backends, front ends, and mobile apps, all in one place). Definitely give this a try this month.

JavaScript for 2025 🤺

If you haven't been keeping up to date with all the new JavaScript features, this article will catch you up to speed with all the new and useful thing you can now do with JS.

Some features that every JavaScript developer should know in 2025.

Ultimate Guide to NodeJS Testing 👨‍🔬

A deep dive into the world of NodeJS and testing has been updated this month. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you might be able to read it all: NodeJS Testing Best Practices.

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...

• Bare is the new game in town and is making waves in the JavaScript world. It let's you run JavaScript... everywhere.

• Hako is a fork of PrimJS that is designed to provide a portable, secure, and performant JavaScript engine that can easily be embedded in any program and scale with your needs.

• Apache ECharts - most people agree this is the best open source JavaScript visualization library.

News Around the World 🗺

• Spain and Portugal had a major power outage that lasted for many hours on the entire peninsula. Here is a good engineering discussion around this.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• OpenAI had some big announcements. First, a new series of GPT models featuring major improvements on coding, instruction following, and long context—plus the first-ever nano model in the 4.1 in the API. Second, they want to build a social network (prediction: it ain't gonna work). Third, and my favourite, they introduced Sycophancy in GPT-4o... ha ha.

• Google is making waves with Gemini 2.5 (see last month's newsletter), and many people are saying Google is now in the lead in the AI race. This month they announced Gemini 2.5 Flash. "Gemini 2.5 Flash is our first fully hybrid reasoning model, giving developers the ability to turn thinking on or off. The model also allows developers to set thinking budgets to find the right tradeoff between quality, cost, and latency. Even with thinking off, developers can maintain the fast speeds of 2.0 Flash, and improve performance." They also announced Gemma 3 QAT Models which can run on your local GPU.

Some comments from users:

Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model pushes back on me rather than contorting itself to find a way to agree.

100% of my casual AI usage is now in Gemini and I look forward to asking it questions on deep topics because it consistently provides me with insight. I am building new tools with the mind to optimize my usage to increase it's value to me.

• Anthropic's Claude (my favourite LLM) Code release this post which covers tips and tricks that have proven effective for using Claude Code across various codebases, languages, and environments.

• Alibaba released Qwen 3 and the benchmarks are looking very good.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Watch TV from around the world. Bonus for being a cool website.

• Garfield without Garfield.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age: Leveraging Experience for Better Results.

This is a great read to keep up with the AI trend (is anyone talking about anything else other than AI lately!?). The article describes well-suited real-life Coding Assistant use cases, and explains in detail the supporting practices that result in successful AI coding sessions.

By providing well-structured requirements, implementing appropriate guard rails through tools that the AI agent can use, and by using file-based “keyframing”, it is possible to harness the power of AI while maintaining code quality and architectural integrity.

This is a great thread for you to read and understand the current value of LLMs instead of reading another sensational AI blog post or another youtube video from that famous YouTuber with no experience.

To be honest, this was the best resource of the month, but this is a tech newsletter so it would have been very confusing to you if I just had this.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• This is super cool... Pocket Flow Tutorial Project: Turns GitHub repo into Easy Tutorial with AI

• CSS-only minimal image blurrying. Cool little trick!

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 an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our most popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.