Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

67th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter - January 2024

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 January 2024 as a Web Developer…

New year, new me. Let's see what the industry is up to...

Need Some Inspiration? 🎋

These are the most hearted CodePens of 2023. Don't let it discourage you, but instead inspire you to create something beautiful like these pens.

Now give me a second while I scream into my pillow.

React News 💎

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

1. It's 2024, so let's talk about the 2 most important topics: React Libraries for 2024, and How to Start a React Project in 2024.

2. React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It's not all just roses and rainbows I'm afraid.

3. React Aria - Over 40 components with built-in behavior, adaptive interactions, top-tier accessibility, and internationalization out of the box, ready for your styles, built by the Adobe team.

4. The Tailwind team announce Catalyst: A modern UI kit for React

5. The 2 Reacts. One on the user device, and one on the server. How do you handle it? Components are code, and that code has to run somewhere. But wait... whose computer should they run on? Should they run on the user device or server?

JavaScript Stars 🌟

Although it's not the most useful metric in the development world, Github Stars are a way to notice some of the die hard development communities around the web.

In 2023, here are the winners of the Rising Stars in JavaScript.

I can't help but think that someone is gaming the system here because the winner was... shadcn/ui, a collection of UI components written in React, allowing customizable styling through TailwindCSS.

Huh... WHO!?

Weekend Project Idea 🐟

This is a great project idea for this weekend while using the Web Storage API as your database.

An important line in this post is this: "Hobby projects are fragile. They can only last if they’re simple to maintain, otherwise keeping them working becomes tedious and the author eventually gives up."

The Hateful 10 🤠

The world of JavaScript has evolved significantly, and interview trends have changed a lot over the years.

So in 2024, can you answer these 10 interview questions to show that you're a top level JavaScript Programmer?

How much of a JavaScript nerd are you?

CSS One Liners 💋

CSS has improved a lot in the last couple of years, and a lot of the things you could only do with Sass, can now be done natively in CSS.

Here are 12 modern CSS one liners that you should know about, and should use.

Let's Talk HTMX 🎃

HTMX is getting a lot of attention lately. If you aren't familiar with how it works, I recommend this article to give you a nice overview of why it exists and why it may be useful.

For fsx Sake 😲

"Filesystem APIs in JavaScript runtimes haven't been great for a long time" (shots fired at the Node fs module). fsx made an attempt to make a better one. fsk - A modern filesystem API for JavaScript. Looks very promising.

Let's Talk About A.I. 🤖

Whether you hate it or not, A.I. and that term is shaking up the industry.

I made a video on the topic and it's free for you to watch: The Future of A.I. and how to use ChatGPT.

While we are on the topic, the initial versions of the Ollama Python and JavaScript libraries are now available. Both libraries make it possible to integrate new and existing apps with Ollama in a few lines of code and use the Ollama REST API for all your A.I. needs. It's a fun way to test out some of these LLMs.

It's About the (Data)Base 🧬

Databases can be boring to some and annoyingly exciting to others. One thing we can agree on, however, is that it's important to know how they work and how to scale them well.

With that said, distributed systems is definitely one of the most fascinating branch of computer science. Many problems in distributed systems simply do not have a clean solution, instead there are different trade-offs you can make.

So how do you scale?

Although this post is a little technical, it will teach you amazing concepts about databases and how you can use them as your data grows.

If that article goes over your head a bit, get up to speed by taking our databases course.

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...

• Shoelace - A forward-thinking library of web components, so it works with all frontend frameworks.

• Bun is trying to do everything in the JavaScript ecosystem and they just released the Bun shell.

• Deno 1.40 is out with the Temporal API.

News Around the World 🗺

Just because I know some of you missed this from last issue, watch it because it's good:

• 2023 was a great year for computer science. Here are 2023's biggest breakthroughs

Big Tech News 🏢

• Big news out of OpenAI this month: ChatGPT store is officially live. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities and a potential new market? Time will tell. They also announced ChatGPT for teams.

• Google has done another round of job cuts. Pretty standard way to trim some of the large hiring pushes in 2020 and 2021. Other companies are following. Good thing you're a ZTM student that's not a junior.

• Disney has quietly released this pad which might change the game on VR.

• A test environment without two-factor authentication led to Microsoft’s corporate systems getting popped open.

• What is Apple's A.I. strategy? They have been awfully quiet, but my money is on them getting it right. Here is the real story of what they are working on.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Pacman in one line.

• If you want to feel real bad about how little you have accomplished in your life... Thomas Cochrane is here to make you feel worse.

• When you have too much time on your hands.

• Battle of the Pongs

Best Resource of the Month ✅

This doesn't happen very often, so it has to be the best resource of the month...a new code editor has entered the chat: Zed.

It looks very promising and it might make me switch off of Sublime Text 4 finally (no, I haven't jumped ship to VS Code).

Ok ok, I have to add another one for this month since this article blew me away.

I highly recommend reading this to be inspired by what you can do with your technical knowledge. There is a lot of insights into problem solving skills in this one: What's that touchscreen in my room?

Trick of the Month 🌗

• This is so cool. Open Source backend for your next app in 1 file. Might be the best way for you to build your MVP for free.

• The ultimate "look like a hacker in the coffee shop" tool: Blazing fast terminal-ui for git written in rust 🦀.

• A neat way to share secrets across the web: Retriever lets you request secrets from anyone without any of the data going to a server.

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.