Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

44th 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 February 2022 as a Web Developer…

Trailing Slashes on URLs 🐌

Can you think of a more insignificant topic? Actually, you may be surprised to hear that a simple / at the end of a URL makes a big difference.

Quick question: which of these should you be using?

zerotomastery.io/resources

v.s.

zerotomastery.io/resources/

Learn all about it here.

Free Tools for Web Developers ✂️

Some tools and assets to help you build your next project since we are best friends by now (unless this is your first time reading my articles… in that case let’s take things slow):

1. Free 3D assets every day
2. Download and generate mock UIs
3. 150 free vector illustrations for your next project
4. Want more? Royalty free illustrations right here!
5. Add some color in your life

For those of you who don't know, the ZTM team and I list our all-time best free resources here for you. Or... you can go back and read all of the previous issues of this newsletter. That's a joke. Don't do that!

React News 💎

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

• Things you should look out for in 2022 from React. This article will go over topics that will either make a big impact on the field of React development or concepts that every React developer should look out for this year.

• Performance and React! Such a fun topic with so many controversial opinions and so many best practices that seem to flip-flop in just 6 months. Is it even possible to say anything definitive here or to make any generalized recommendations? Let's see.

• The "best" way to manage icons in React.js.

• How to do authentication with React Router v6.

• The React Native team has announced that the new architecture will be rolled out in 2022... learn all about it here.

Why Learn Angular? 🧲

Despite what the latest trendy survey might tell you, Angular is absolutely crushing it in the enterprise web development space. These are the 5 top reasons why you should learn Angular:

1. Type Safety
2. Encourages best practices
3. Regular Releases
4. Support from Google
5. Designed for enterprise-level apps

Now let's get into the nitty-gritty of each... read about it here.

Speaking of trendy surveys that don't always show the most accurate picture...

JavaScript Survey 📡

The very popular State of JavaScript survey finally came out (a little later than previous years).

I resonate with this one commenter on hackernews:

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing).

In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the most "popular".

The "Back end frameworks" section is particularly bad. Sveltekit and Astro are not "back end frameworks" unless you define tech by what marketing copy people have written. Even express (which I still use daily for most of my back end projects) barely qualifies as a "framework" in my opinion. Again I have the feeling that choosing which techs go into this section is driven by something like "github star delta" rather than an evaluation of what the tech actually does.

Finally, jeez, angular isn't that bad. Plenty of enterprises use it successfully, and for companies with .NET or Java stacks, it's a great fit. I think almost certainly the devs at those kinds of companies are probably busy just doing their day job and not responding to "state of hype mixed in with some subtle marketing by commercial companies" surveys like this one has become.

Node Is So Fetch 📗

Node.js v17.5 introduces support for fetch() – a popular cross-platform HTTP client API that works in browsers and Web/Service Workers – as an experimental core feature.

Come Node.js v18, it will be officially part of the runtime! No more installing the the popular node-fetch npm library for your http requests on the server! You can read about how it will work here.

Make Aspect Ratio Great Again 🖼

The new aspect-ratio property in CSS hits all the right spots: neatly solving with a single line of CSS something that was, quite frankly, a bit of faff before. With Safari finally catching up in September 2021, we can finally feel confident using this property in all of our projects now. Learn why it's so great here.

Clickbait of the Month 📬

With a title like this, how can you not read this article from the Github blog: Move over JavaScript: Back-end languages are coming to the front-end. Can we now build web application without JavaScript? Perhaps what we're seeing is not so much a pendulum swing, but a state of equilibrium where computing happens on both client and server in equal measure depending on the needs of the user.

HTTP3 ⛓

A reminder that HTTP/3 is pretty much here and in this article you will learn everything you need to know about the next-generation web protocol and why it's so QUIC HA!. Please read the article so you think my joke is funny.

Can You Build Babel? 🟨

A really fun article on how you can pretty much recreate the tokenizer tool that is Babel. Essentially: convert a code string into a list of tokens. A great weekend project idea.

I lied.. this next one is WAY better as a weekend project idea...

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

Here is the best idea ever... How to write a program that sends cats to your phone when you are sad at the computer. Yes you read that right.

Rapper Objects 🍾

Gold chains, fast cars, a dope ass recording studio. These are Rapper Objects. Boolean, Number, BigInt, String, Symbol. These are Wrapper Objects.

I don't have a resource for Rapper Objects, but I do for Wrapper Objects. Here it is.

Hydration is Fun 🍸

When it comes to client side hydration, there are two characteristics that are pretty unfortunate. One is we render on the server, and now we basically need to re-render it again in the browser to hydrate everything. The second is we tend to send everything across the wire twice. Once as HTML and once in JavaScript. Here is the problem of hydration in the modern web.

Pay Attention To WebAssembly 🌚

WebAssembly is at an inflection point. Over the next few years, expect to see increased adoption of WebAssembly across the tech sphere, from containerization to plugin systems to serverless computing platforms. This article is a discussion of what WebAssembly is, what makes it a relevant technology, and where it’s being used today.

Everything Old is Cool 😎

In another episode of "Humans have amnesia and constantly reinvent something from the past"... Move over Microservices because Monorepos are back in the game! Here is a website dedicated to all you need to know about monorepos, and the tools to build them.

Fun fact: Google is famous for their massive monorepo.

How Does it End? 🥁

It is a good time to be in tech right now: soaring salaries, daily LinkedIn recruiter spam, people bootcamping their way into career switches to tech, remote work allowing you to work for a major tech company making triple digit salaries from the beach. It really feels like every single company is trying to recruit programmers nowadays, and doing whatever they can to get them. But what does the future hold?

The Deal With Dynamic Programming 🎲

It's a werid name that doesn't mean much... but it stuck and now it is a specific thing that you will encounter in those software engineering interviews. We explain it in our Master the Coding Interview courses, but for those too lazy to check those out, here is a simple recap of what Dynamic Programming is all about.

The 99% Developers 👨‍🎤

An important article that everyone should read this month. Should you move to serverless? Is GraphQL the answer to your API woes? Should you follow the latest DevOps playbook to increase your system reliability? In the world of tech tools, there’s a lot of buzz. But it doesn’t always reflect the daily reality of programmers. Building for the 99% Developers.

New Libraries and Tools 🗿

Just because we had a ton of these this month, I've added them into this section. Check out these shiny new/interesting things:

• Apache ECharts. An Open Source JavaScript Visualization Library.

• Want to get even cooler charts? How about this chart animation library: Vizzu

• Express.js v5 is coming out soon. Here is the beta.

• NextJS v12.1 is here!

News Around the World 🗺

• When being a software developer really pays: Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” by the New York Times.

• DeepMind, famous for AlphaGo and AlphaFold, just made a huge leap solving novel problems and setting a new milestone in competitive programming: AlphaCode. Machine generated code is getting closer to human levels... watch out ;)

• Feds arrest married couple, seize $3.6 billion in hacked bitcoin funds. This story is straight out of a millennial crime drama. Absolutely wild story still being told.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Facebook parent Meta’s stock suffered its biggest single-day loss yet as the company refocuses on the ‘metaverse’. They also are launching Facebook Pay. What could go wrong here?

• SoftBank dumps sale of ARM over regulatory hurdles... it didn't work out so ARM is going to IPO instead. Chip technology will be a hot topic of discussion in 2022.

• German Court Rules Websites Embedding Google Fonts Violates GDPR. Going to be a nightmare for developers.

• The big battle we have spoken about in this newsletter came to a close. "We’re pleased to share that Elastic and Amazon have resolved the trademark infringement lawsuit related to the term Elasticsearch. Now the only Elasticsearch service on AWS and the AWS Marketplace is Elastic Cloud." Elastic and Amazon Reach Agreement on Trademark Infringement Lawsuit.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Watch Magnus Carlsen (may be the greatest chess player of all time) get stunned by 17-year-old super talent Abdusattorov Nodirbek in chess.

• Spot the animals.

• Why analog computers are coming back.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

I have now written this newsletter every month for over 3 years. Wow, that's a really long time, but why am I telling you all of this? To justify what I am about to do: put my own article as the best resource of the month.

Hear me out though... I NEVER put my own posts as the best resource of the month but I think this one is really really good. Don't believe me? How about you check it out and tell me it's not half decent:

Top 7 Soft Skills For Developers & How To Learn Them

Skills that you can learn to stand out from the rest. Skills that will never become outdated and you will have for life. Intrigued? Go read the article.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Love emails but hate people? Don’t want someone 🤡 at your party 🥳 but have to invite them 🤢 cause your mom 💁‍♀️ made you? Trust Straight 2 Spam to send your v important email 📧 straight to their spam 🗑. Yes, this tool exists.

• Want to play in a Linux environment on the web? WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running fully client-side on the web.

• How to show your appreciation to your favorite open source developers and projects.

• jless — a command-line JSON viewer

• Are you shy? Then here is your trick: The Painfully Shy Developer's Guide to Networking for a Better Job (Without Being Creepy)

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.