[December 2023] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

66th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter - December 2023

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 December 2023 as a Web Developer…

First off, Happy New Year! Thank you for reading this monthly newsletter for so many years (that I totally don't leave until the last minute and dread writing on the last day of the month but I'm too committed now and too many of you read so I can't stop. I'm trapped help me...)

Ok back to this month's news:

Build a Framework ⛩

This was a great article to deepen your JavaScript knowledge.

Build a simple JavaScript Framework so you understand how other frameworks like React (if you say React is a library and not a framework, you're annoying) and Angular are built.

If you follow along this guide, and customize it, you can even add this impressive framework to your portfolio to wow employers 😉.

React News 💎

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

A fun little story about JSX, browsers, and chain reactions.
React Tricks: Fast, Fit and FunLessons - some tricks and hacks that this programmer learned while maintaining an open-source React library.
An oldie, but a goodie to end 2023. Here is the list and ways to use some of the most popular React libraries of 2023.

Maglev Shmalev 🌋

For those that enjoy geeking out on this stuff, V8 engine which powers Chrome browser, NodeJS and other developer favourites got a new optimizing compiler: Maglev.

Maglev sits between the existing Sparkplug and TurboFan compilers, and fills the role of a fast optimizing compiler that generates good enough code, fast enough.

Cool names all around!

Weekend Project Idea 🐟

Play around with this tool that no longer has a waitlist: https://v0.dev/.

It's built by the Vercel team, and allows you to easily use AI to create visual components and more. Let me know what you end up building this weekend using this tool!

History of the Web 🛕

Want to learn the history of where your industry came from?

This is the best resource I could find. Full of interesting tidbits for you to understand how we all got here.

History of Data Engineering 🛖

Although not directly related to this newsletter, the history part of this article is super interesting and I think you would agree too.

I highly recommend reading that section to get a better understanding of the data world.

Fun With SVGs 👾

In recent years there has been a design trend that runs counter to the clean look. Illustrations still rule in web design, but instead of clean, flat shapes there has been an emergence of texture, usually as part of a design’s lighting or shading and usually a “noisy” or grainy.

This is how to do it.

Let's Talk About A.I. 🚀

Whether you hate it or not, A.I. and that term is shaking up the industry. Don't believe me?

Check out this presentation about how the world has changed because of A.I. in 2023.

It's worth keeping an eye out on things and here at ZTM you can expect a lot of content around this in 2024.

11 Million Users With 6 People 🧬

In January 2012, Pinterest hit 11.7 million monthly unique users with only 6 engineers.

This is how they did it.

Articles like these are my favourite for teaching you how simplicity and smart engineering always wins over hype-of-the-week-ai-tool-library-using-island-architecture-microservices.

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...

SvelteKit 2 is here - too bad Svelte still has this problem.
Redux-Toolkit 2.0 is here! This release is part of a wave of major versions of all the Redux packages: Redux Toolkit 2.0, Redux core 5.0, React-Redux 9.0, Reselect 5.0, and Redux Thunk 3.0.
New thingy: StyleX takes the developer experience of CSS-in-JS libraries and uses compile-time tooling to bridge it with the performance and scalability of static CSS
Astro 4.0 is here, and I still don't know anyone that actually uses it for real things.
Oxlint is here! Think of it as a much faster ESlint for linting your JavaScript code... at least that's the goal.
More Bun updates. Deno is still cooler.

News Around the World 🗺

It's the end of the year and I'm sick and tired of 2023 "end of the world" type news. So to end the year with a good bang (...👀), here is how to kill a developer in 4 words or less.
2023 was a great year for computer science. Here are 2023's biggest breakthroughs

Big Tech News 🏢

Google introduced its new GeminiAI trying to battle OpenAI's ChatGpt. For those that are confused: the main Gemini excitement is Gemini Ultra (which is claimed to beat GPT-4). The one available through Bard is Gemini Pro.
Figma and Adobe merger is officially off! I have a suspicion that Adobe lucked out on this because they were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market, and with the new Generative AI wave, they now have Adobe Firefly. Although Adobe does have to pay $1 BILLION to Figma because the deal didn't go thourhg... ouch 😬. Curious to see what the consequences of this will be over the coming years.
Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight. Funny that this happened before the Apple store.
How Nvidia become a trillion dollar company. An interesting story with a lot of history lessons.
(Very famous) Design executive Tang Tan is set to leave Apple in February and will join Jony Ive’s LoveFrom design studio... which works with OpenAI. Interesting.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Kind of interesting: A bride-to-be discovers a reality-bending mistake in Apple's computational photography.
Optical Illusions using A.I. (pre-trained diffusion models).... trippy.
Wiggly drawings. People are creative.
Fun tool for video exploration: A GPT-4/Gemini Voice/Video Exploration Tool

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Let's end the year on a strong note with this excellent article: Code is read more than written.

A simple reminder to everyone here that should be common programmer knowledge:

The person first writing a piece of code shouldn’t buy convenience at the expense of the people who will have to read it and modify it in the future.

More generally, code is read more than written.

It’s usually a good investment to make the code maintainable by keeping it simple, writing tests and documentation, etc.

It’s about having perspective over the software development cycle. You follow this and you will make everyone in your company happy.

Here is an example of this practice in real life.

Trick of the Month 🌗

Want to see how your year looked in coding? Here is Github Unwrapped.
Generate a snake game from a Github user contributions graph and output a screen capture as animated svg or gif. This may be the coolest trick ever. Great way to end 2023 / start 2024!
Wireflow - free, online and open source tool for creating beautiful user flow prototypes. No Photoshop skills required.
Wow. For those hardcore people with multiple computers.

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

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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.