Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

43rd 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 January 2022 as a Web Developer…

History of Static Site Generators 👩‍🏫

I love history lessons in tech. Static site generators (SSGs) can be beneficial for making large websites without reducing performance. They have existed for more than a decade, but they have evolved a lot, especially more recently due to the rise of “Jamstack.”

This article goes over the background of static site generators, why people use them, and the current state of them.

Top 10 Articles from 2021 👑

For you regular readers of this newsletter (and our my friends as well!), here are my top 10 articles from 2021.

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. All the gradients you will ever need
2. Box shadow for those projects of yours
3. Psych! There is more gradients this month than you can ever need
4. Everyone gets a TypeScript cheatsheet!
5. Free logos to use for your next project

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?

• I dare you not to get annoyed by the green outline of this article: React Project Layout.

• 3 React Component Design Patterns You Should Know About.

• Some good advice on JSX conditionals.

• A hot take on Remix vs Next.js written by the Remix team. Wonder who wins?

• How React Server Components work. This is probably the best article I have read on the topic.

2022 JavaScript Book 📗

You can read the 2022 version of the popular book JavaScript for Impatient Programmers for free right here. That's it...

Gotcha! One more thing: here are the rising stars (aka tools) in the JavaScript ecosystem.

UUIDs Can Be Interesting 😎

If you know what UUIDs are, then you know that it's an amazing piece of technology that allows anyone listening to people talking about UUIDs to fall asleep instantly. All joking aside, this is probably the best article I have read on what UUIDs and ULIDs are under the hood, and how to encode and use them (and why you definitely should be using them). Trust me, it's super interesting and it won't make you fall asleep.

Something You Already Know 😉

How often do people actually copy and paste from Stack Overflow? Now we know. Spoiler: all the time.

Fuite Loops 🍓

Fun fact: remove 'i' from Fuite and it turns into a bad word in Romanian. Fuite also happens to be the newest tool you can use to check for memory leaks in your app. Debugging memory leaks in web apps is hard. The tooling exists, but it’s complicated, cumbersome, and often doesn’t answer the simple question: Why is my app leaking memory? This tool helps you with that.

Single Page App Caution 💄

If you're a long time ZTM member or reader, this isn't anything new to you: Single Page Applications aren't always the right choice. There are some downsides to everything. Here is a great article outlining some of the shortcomings of single page application.

State Of The Web Deno Edition 🦕

Deno is cool. The Web is cool. Together, they are pretty great together. Here is how the still infant Deno is doing in the big and scary world of the web.

NPM Troubles... again 🤬

Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking. This article explains the strange story (reads like a soap opera) behind this.

The community solved the problem though. Yey!

PHP in 2022 🧱

Hello darling my old friend. Remember me? Yep, still a thing, and still going strong. Here is what PHP is up to in the web dev space in 2022.

Let's Talk Crypto 🌚

You can't go anywhere these days without seeing your old degenerate friend from highschool talking about his Ant Eater Army NFT (not an actual thing but I also didn't google it so totally could be a business worth $1 billion).

Here's the thing, all joking aside, the blockchain technology is super interesting from the technical side of things and totally worth learning if you are interested in the topic.

There is a lot of junk out there but also gems (but a very very small %). This past month we had 2 respected experts weigh in on the topic from a technical perspective. Really worth the time to read and watch:

• Web3 First Impressions
• The Problem With NFTs: Line Goes Up

JavaScript is so in 🦥

The JavaScript in operator is more versatile than you may have thought. Here is a fun little read for you JavaScript addicts.

Why So Chromium? 🎭

"Every time there is a post here related to Firefox, I see a lot of people complaining about the state of browsers and the utterly dominance of Chrome and Chromium based browsers.

I’m wondering if that are technical reasons why the newish browsers (such as Brave or Edge) are choosing Chromium instead of Firefox as their starting point. If so, shouldn’t this be a priority for Mozilla to change that?"

Here is an interesting discussion around this topic.

Making JavaScript Games 🎮

Learn how to build JavaScript games with Kaboom.js on Replit. This is a free book since it was sponsored by Replit. Totally worth the download and is a good weekend project idea for you.

Biggest JavaScript Hipster 👨‍🎤

If you want to be better than your JavaScript friends, then look no further. You can let all those inferior friends know about the new features being added to JavaScript before they can even say "you didn't update your package.json file today".

Here is how to keep track of all the stage 4 proposals that are going to be added to the language every year.

Speaking of... Even though structuredClone() is not part of ECMAScript, it was added to the platform-specific parts (i.e many browsers, Node and Deno). Here is how it works.

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:

• Lume - Static Site Generator for Deno!

• Vitest - A new testing framework has entered the scene to take over Jest's dominance. A blazing fast unit-test framework

powered by the popular Vite ⚡️.

• Look Ma! Another static site generator for the JavaScript developers! Eleventy

• Let's keep pretending that people other than Facebook are actually using this library: Relay v13 is out!

• Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust!

• React Native 0.67 is outskie.

News Around the World 🗺

• NASA’s Webb Telescope Reaches Major Milestone as Mirror Unfolds. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations (Taking pictures). This is pretty amazing news and we will have many years of incredible images of space to come.

• Over 90 WordPress themes, plugins backdoored in supply chain attack.

• First pig to human heart transplant seems to have worked. Crazy impressive.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Lying is never a good idea. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes found guilty this month.

• Equifax is selling your salary data. The ultimate grifter company.

• IBM Watson is being sold off since it wasn't as impressive as all the marketing made it out to be.

• Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device. Translation: Microsoft spent a ton of money buying this gaming company to dominate the space.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Make real life rupees: Real-life Rupees: How to Grow Green Potassium Ferrioxalate Crystals From Iron Rust

• Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up

• I don't know why, but these pictures put a smile on my face.

• Have fun wasting your time with this game.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

What are the biggest tech questions of 2022? There are a lot of tech unknowns for the year 2022. A serious once in a generation advance of human civilization or a lot of hype?

Here is an excellent article outlining some of the biggest questions in the tech space that will hopefully be answered in 2022. Some of them could turn into a trillion dollar market, others will end up on the pile of junk that everyone forgets about in 2 years.

What do you think?

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Are you on Windows? Burn your apps in style....

• Are you on Mac? Here is a new Mac only code editor: Nova

• Add animations to your website the easy way.

• Make command line glamorous again!

• Find and fix dangling files and unused dependencies in your JavaScript projects.

Don't be selfish. 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.