[February 2024] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

68th 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 February 2024 as a Web Developer…

Big NGINX News 🪚

This is a big one... NGINX is forking. NGINX, for those that don't know, is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.

It's one of the most used/popular tools on the web.

There is big drama happening around it right now which you can read about here. It's a juicy story of individual devs and corporations.

React News 💎

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

React team sent out an update of what they have been working on and the upcoming React 19 updates. To be honest, it feels like the project has lost direction ever since they introduced all of this complexity with the initial hooks update. Just me? Here is an interesting discussion around this topic.
Let's talk about all of the React trends in 2024 and what to look out for.
Next.js App Router update. Has it been good, bad or ugly? This article explores the benefits and the consequences.
Remix vs NextJS, which one should you chose? Here is the breakdown. Or, you can just learn both and pick your favourite (we teach both at ZTM).

Deno and Node in 2023 🦕

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I'm a big fan of Deno (yes, even if Bun tried to steal its thunder last year).

If you're not on the bandwagon, I recommend you give this a read. They are doing some great things in the ecosystem.

Not to be outdone, here is what NodeJS has been up to in 2023.

Bonus: Check out this Node vs. Deno vs. Bun guide.

AWS Tries JavaScript 🏃

AWS labs has created a really cool thing: LLRT (Low Latency Runtime) is a lightweight JavaScript runtime designed to address the growing demand for fast and efficient Serverless applications.

LLRT offers up to over 10x faster startup and up to 2x overall lower cost compared to other JavaScript runtimes running on AWS Lambda.

It's built in Rust, utilizing QuickJS as JavaScript engine, ensuring efficient memory usage and swift startup. Pretty cool way to address the cold start problem.

Sudo for Windows 🧞‍♂️

Pretty big news for the Windows world... Yep, it's really happening. Sudo is coming to Windows.

It's obviously not just a fork of the Linux sudo - there's enough that's different about the permissions structure between OS's that just a straight port wouldn't make sense.

But the dream of being able to run commands as admin, in the same terminal window - that's the experience they're finally bringing to users.

Let's Talk Philosophy 🧘‍♀️

Believe it or not, I hate writing blog posts. Writing this newsletter is the one piece of content I write a month, and it pains me (hey, enough of you read it now so I can't stop).

Despite this, I decided to finally write down what I think are important principles in learning.

These are the 10 Learning Commandments.

OK, no more blog posts from me other than this newsletter. I retire. I hope you like this one!

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...

Tempo is here. It's probably the only JavaScript library you should be using for dates moving forward.
A weird pivot from Observable (think Jupyter Notebooks for JavaScript): Observable 2.0 is now an open-source static site generator for building fast, beautiful data apps, dashboards, and reports.
htmz is a minimalist HTML microframework for creating interactive and modular web user interfaces with the familiar simplicity of plain HTML.
Redwood v7 is out. I used to have high hopes for this tool, but it doesn't look like it has gained enough traction.
Figma & React components: Functional UI Kit

News Around the World 🗺

Everyone be happy: FCC Makes AI-Generated Voices in Robocalls Illegal
Japan is betting $67 billion on becoming the next big chip maker.

Big Tech News 🏢

Apple released the Vision Pro, AR headset. Here is the technical breakdown of the product that people are getting excited about. Speaking of Apple, they are also being a little cheeky.
One more bit of Apple news: they quietly announced new encryption for iMessages. PQ3 introduces resilient encryption and extensive defences against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks.
TSMC (that big chip factory out of Taiwan) is going to build their second chip factory in Japan. A big sigh of relief for those worried about geopolitics and chip manufacturing.
Turns out all this A.I. is good for the GPU business. Nvidia has now become more valuable than Google and Amazon.
Google released their newest A.I. model: Gemini 1.5 (formerly known as Bard). Then they made an oopsie and pulled some parts of it.
A nice move by OpenAI to reward their employees. If you're a ZTM student working at OpenAI, shoot me an email. Would love to do an interview ;).

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

This is pretty creative. What will your alchemy create?

Best Resource of the Month ✅

I guess we have to talk about the biggest news this month: Sora. The crazy part? This is the worst it's going to get.

To understand how big of a deal this is, I recommend watching this video.

Once you finish that video, watch this one on some of the limitations, and possible solutions.

Once you watch the above 2 you should be caught up to speed to the current state of Sora. Keep an eye out on this space, it's going to change a lot of things.

Trick of the Month 🌗

Look like you're debugging websites at work while playing DOOM. DOOM rendered via console.log() in a web browser.

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.