Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

55th 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 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 2023 as a Web Developer…

Functional Programming: Yey or Ney? 🤯

Functional programming has some amazing benefits:

1. Avoid bugs related to mutable state.
2. Write declarative code.
3. Write code that is easier to test.

What does all of that mean? Learn some of these quick benefits in this nice little post on Functional Programming.

React News 💎

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

1. Shopify is betting big on React Native. "In 2020, we announced that React Native is the future of mobile at Shopify and since then we’ve been migrating all our native mobile apps to React Native."

2. Speaking of React Native, with the release of 0.71, React Native is investing in first class support for TypeScript.

3. Simple React Component That Makes Titles More Readable: React Wrap Balancer

4. The thing that the React team has been talking about for the last 4+ years and it kind of works: Everything you need to know about Concurrent React (with a little bit of Suspense)

5. Never ending cycle of React changes continues with some CRA news. Funny how the original appeal of React just being a "view layer" library is slowly dissolving.

Databases in 2022: A Year in Review 📦

This is a great post by a well known person in the industry (Dr. Andy Pavlo) detailing some of the highlights of the database world in 2022.

What happened and what should you take note of?

Read it all here.

State of JS 2022 🔮

State of JS 2022 is out!

It's a bit of a biased survey that tends to lean towards a lot of the "what's hot on twitter, but nobody actually uses in production" trends.

But it's still worth checking out.

I approve of this year's survey especially since ZTM made the top of a very important list. Watch out 2023... ZTM cult is taking over:

Modules, Not Microservices 🏯

A hackernews user said it very well:

Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization.

There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that need it).

The first problem, modules, can be solved at the language level. Modules can do that job, and that's the point of this blog post.

The second problem, scalability, is harder to solve at the language level in most languages outside those designed to be run in a distributed environment.

But most people need it a lot less than they think. Normally the database is your bottleneck and if you keep your application server stateless, you can just run lots of them; the database can eventually be a bottleneck, but you can scale up databases a lot.

6 JavaScript Projects To Watch 🎈

The JavaScript world is evolving quickly. There are lots of growing projects, some of which deserve your attention... maybe.

According to this article, these are the 6 projects you should keep an eye out on in 2023.

Keep in mind, these projects are at fairly early stages and I personally wouldn't jump on the bandwagon until a bit more time passes.

If you love the fads, then you can check this out: 2022 JavaScript Rising Stars.

CSS Power 🎡

Did you know that CSS can do a lot more than just confuse you when trying to place an element in the center of 10318301283 types of screen sizes?

It can also do some cool animations!

Deep Cloning Objects 🧬

The title sounds a lot cooler than what you actually do here. Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, the Modern Way: This is how you do it.

Vue in 2023 🔋

Evan You from Vue wants You to be caught up. Ha, say that fast 5 times.

Here is a recap what happened in 2022 and what to expect in 2023 from the Vue community.

VueJS 2022 Year in Review.

Keep An Eye On Rust 🦀

By this point, you must know about Rust. This programming language that is gaining traction and love from developers year after year.

It's a must for modern low level programming, especially for those working on the browser. Chromium project (that thing that runs most browsers) is going to support the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++ in Chromium now.

Start learning Rust for free right now 👇

Is TypeScript Worth It? 🧐

I have strong feelings on this... but who cares what I think.

Check out this interesting discussion on whether TypeScript is worth having in your JavaScript project or not.

What team are you on?

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...

• Bun v0.5 is out! Deno is still cooler.

• Astro 2.0 is here!

• TypeScript 5.0 Beta is here. Go tell people how much you like static typing.

News Around the World 🗺

• Previous Director of AI at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, uses Github Copilot... maybe you should too? He also did a video on how to build ChatGPT from Scratch.

• CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ secrets.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Microsoft Hopes OpenAI’s Chatbot Will Make Bing Smarter... so they decided to invest $10 billion into the project. Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. Check out this article for a discussion about whether Microsoft's investment is a good idea or not.

• Tech layoffs are everywhere. This time around Google announced 12,000 employees will be let go. The above is the formal letter. The truthful letter is here. Are you be worried about all these tech layoffs? If so, check this out and you'll be less worried.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• This may be the coolest web app ever built

• Draw SVG rope using JavaScript

• A cool website: 4 Thousand Weeks

• Everything is fine. Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robot Atlas is now tossing tool bags around a construction site

• These are ducks right?

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering.

This is an important article for you to read. In my day to day job, I read articles like these all the time. A lot of them give advice that is quite valuable.

However, I don't think I have ever read an article that is so valuable and to the point.

If there is one thing you read this month, make sure it's this one. My favourite one is: Code is secondary. Business value is first.

If you like stuff like this, I also recommend you check out this for 20 more additional insights.

Bonus: I also wanted to add this to the Best Resource of the Month. It's not related to tech, but perhaps reading this will give you a fresh perspective today. Trust me on this.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• How to store your app's entire state in the url

• Free resume templates for you to shine like the star you are

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 my courses below or see all ZTM courses here.