[December 2022] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

54th 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 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 December 2022 as a Web Developer…

Cache Invalidation is Tough 🧹

Computer programs keep the data that they need in main memory. The problem with main memory is that accessing it is slow in computer time. To improve performance, CPUs keep some of the memory in a faster, local cache.

There’s a tradeoff between the size of the cache and its speed, and so computer architects use a hierarchical cache design where they have multiple caches of different sizes and speeds.

This post does an excellent job explaining a real life problem at Netflix using caches.

React News 💎

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

Let's take a break from all this React fatigue... I've given you enough articles about React this past year... so for now to end the year, here are 2 of my favourite articles from the past year about React:

Speeding The JavaScript Ecosystem 🎢

Most popular libraries can be sped up by avoiding unnecessary type conversions or by avoiding creating functions inside functions... read this excellent blog post to learn how to use these powerful axioms.

Fortress of Logic 🏯

The pioneering programmable computer that John von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

Take a little history lesson in computing by reading this great article. You won't regret it.

ChatGPT Hype 🤖

You couldn't explore the interwebs this month without hearing about ChatGPT. OpenAI's new and improved GPT3 child.

How will it affect our future? Is it revolutionary and will it replace your job? Probably not, but it's worth learning about and playing with it. Do this to get caught up:

Watch this video to learn the background of ChatGPT and how it works.
See how people are fooling "it".
This was my favourite one: Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

JS Frontends Suck 🏎

Ha! Made you look. IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S US... WE'RE BREAKING UP WITH JAVASCRIPT FRONTENDS.

I don't necessarily agree with all of the points in this presentation, but it does give you an insight into some of the issues in the current JavaScript ecosystem and how frontend apps are built.

I especially enjoyed this comment from a reader:

"The biggest problem facing the front-end space today isn't so much of complexity of a particular library, rendering technique, or view/model architecture, but rather lots of bad ideas glued together, creating nightmare scenarios for companies trying to maintain products.

A micro dependency system with never ending breaking changes to glue different tools and libraries together - bad idea.

Using un-opinionated "libraries" that don't scale well, but at scale - bad idea.

Technology organizations trying to stay relevant by simply adopting every next hyped fad out there, rather than stepping back to get a bigger picture of what the front-end space actually needs - bad idea."

10 Mostly Dead Languages 📡

This is a fun read. What are the 10 “mostly dead” programming languages that have had a tremendous impact and influence on the programming world? Find out.

Terminal, Console, and Shell 🧐

A deep dive into what a Terminal, Console and Shell are. If you are a developer you use these every day, but do you actually know what they are, their history and their differences? Trust me, you're going to want to read this.

PS. ZTM has a Bash course... it's pretty good if I say so myself.

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...

Bumblebee: GPT2, Stable Diffusion, and more in Elixir!
Vite 4.0 is out!
Unovis: A modular data visualization framework for React, Angular, Svelte, and vanilla TypeScript or JavaScript.
SWR 2.0, the popular React data-fetching library is out!
Finally! After two years in development, SvelteKit has finally reached 1.0. As of today, it’s the recommended way to build Svelte apps of all shapes and sizes.
Tamagui 1.0: Ship cross-platform React apps in ½ the time with 2x performance.

News Around the World 🗺

If you haven't heard about it yet, SBF and FTX are the two of the most common 3 letter acronyms around the web these days. Here is how to scam people out of billions. The story gets crazier with each passing day.
A big breakthrough was made in Fusion Energy this month: ignition using LESS energy than what it produced. Fusion energy has a potential to create clean, sustainable energy in the future to replace all. Still early, but a huge scientific breakthrough.
Okta's source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked... oops.

Big Tech News 🏢

TSMC’s US fab will make 4nm chips for Apple, AMD and Nvidia: The chip manufacturing giant is trying to help meet demand from its big US clients.
Battle between Coinbase and Apple is happening. Should Apple be allowed to charge the 30% fee on all gas prices? You decide...actually no, you have no say, Apple decides.
Apple is planning to move 40-45% iPhone production to India, away from China. Expect the Indian market to explode like China did over the next couple of years.
More Apple news: Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon which means you will be able to build iOS apps natively using Core ML and Stable Diffusion (that thing that makes you create really cool art pieces using text).
John Carmack leaves Meta. Meta's VR division is getting more and more negative press with each passing day.
Uber's nifty little trick: Devpod - Improving Developer Productivity at Uber with Remote Development.
This isn't big tech news but a jab at what I thought was a terrible model (because we all know our ZTM model is the way to go ;)). BloomTech/Lambda School isn't doing too well.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Remember Space Cadet?
Launch and asteroid and see what happens.
Stable Diffusion is cool, but you know what's cooler? Riffusion.
You like jazz? You like websites? Good.
Someone actually spent time building this... Seriously, this is the kind of stuff you follow this newsletter for right?! All the other industry newsletters suck :P.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

A discussion needs to be had around the future of the web, the internet, and all of technology.

The idea of an all-knowing computer program comes from science fiction and should stay there. Despite the seductive fluency of ChatGPT and other language models, they remain unsuitable as sources of knowledge. We must fight against the instinct to trust a human-sounding machine.

No, your job isn't going to be taken over by AI. Working with tools to better assist your work and creativity is where the future is.

Read this article first, and then follow it up with the next one which was my favourite one from the month.

Best article of the month: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off.

What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake?

Trick of the Month 🌗

Extism allows you to run code no matter the language in any of your projects! (Extism, at its core, is a code runtime built in Rust. Underneath the hood, thy run WebAssembly code as the plug-in execution format). Keep an eye out on this project.
Console.log like a Ninja
Obsidian Canvas - An infinite space to visualize and make sense of your ideas.

Happy New Year everyone... Thanks for reading!

Don't be shy now... Share this newsletter with your friends.

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.