Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 79th issue of Web Developer Monthly!

If it’s your first time here, welcome, I like you already. If you want the full back story on the newsletter, head here.

The quick version: I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos from the world of web and software development.

Think the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the programming world. I give you the 20% that will get you 80% of the results.

If you're a long time reader, welcome back old friend.

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what you missed in January 2025 as a Web Developer…

Things We Learned About LLMs in 2024 🥸

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here are the major breakthroughs in the field in the past year and some of the key things you need to be aware of. Later in this newsletter we will discuss the big news coming out this month in 2025 (including DeepSeek) in the Big Tech News section!

By the way, here is a guide on which AI tool to use in 2025.

Node + TypeScript 👷

Node now has built-in support for TypeScript! Starting with v23.6.0, Node.js supports TypeScript without any flags.

This blog post explains how it works and what to look out for.

React News 💎

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

1. React Router 7 is officially out (also kind of called Remix) and here is a nice tutorial on how to use the latest.

2. One of my very opinionated thoughts is that you most likely don't need NextJS. Luckily someone who isn't as lazy as me decided to write this up.

3. There is word on the street that React is introducing a new Animation API. Here is the lowdown on how it is suppose to look.

4. This is a good read: Five years ago, Shopify announced that React Native is the future of mobile at Shopify. Here is what they learned.

5. This company moved away from React 1 year ago. How is it looking now?

Angular in 2025 🫦

Angular has been slowly gaining back popularity and had a great 2024. So what are their plans for 2025?

Read here to find out.

JavaScript Rising Stars 🏆

It's never the best metric, but still worth taking a look: 9th edition of JavaScript Rising Stars shows you the top trends and projects shaping the JS ecosystem. The graphs in the article compare the number of stars added on GitHub over the last 12 months.

Sneak Peak: Temporal & import attributes 🧌

Import attributes reached stage 4 in October 2024 and will probably be part of ECMAScript 2025...so what can we expect from this new JavaScript feature? Learn about it here (it helps with importing artifacts other than JavaScript modules).

Another big thing that is coming to JavaScript is a new way to handle dates and timezones: Temporal.

“Write Better Code” 🎭

This is super interesting: If code can indeed be improved simply through iterative prompting such as asking the LLM to “make the code better” — even though it’s very silly — it would be a massive productivity increase. And if that’s the case, what happens if you iterate on the code too much? What’s the equivalent of code going cosmic?

There’s only one way to find out... read this article.

Work With Large Codebases 🥷

Working in large established codebases is one of the hardest things to learn as a software engineer. You can’t practice it beforehand, and personal projects can never teach you how to do it, because they’re necessarily small and from-scratch.

So what are the best practices? Here they are.

7 Most Influential Papers 🦉

A fun little read for you: The 7 Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History. This is a good history lesson in the computer science field.

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...

• Probably the biggest project that has moved from C++ entirely to Rust and it's one of my favourite tools: Fish 4.0.

• Tabby: a self hosted AI Coding Assistant.

• React Native 0.77: New Styling Features, Android’s 16KB page support, Swift Template.

• Tailwind CSS v4.0 is here and a lot of people are excited about the new promising changes.

• Bun v1.2 is out. They are going for full NodeJS compatibility eventually.

News Around the World 🗺

• Trump pardons Silk Road dark web market creator Ross Ulbricht. The Silk Road story and Ross's has to be made into a movie one day. Super interesting story full of twist and turns.

Big Tech News 🏢

• This has been a month of headlines, but this was the headline that dominated all else in tech: Deepseek’s latest model pretty much matches OpenAI’s best public model at a fraction of the cost (apparently), and it’s open source for anyone to download, copy and build on... Here is a nice summary of everything you need to know:

1. Why is DeepSeek a game changer?
2. It also brings back into attention Reinforcement Learning
3. Illustrated guide to how DeepSeek R1 works
4. But DeepSeek isn't the only one... there are many models coming out of China now that are even better.

• OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX announced a plan to invest $500bn in US AI datacenter over the next 4 years, with $100bn ‘immediately’ in a thing called Project Stargate. This posed a lot of questions...As one comment mentions:

It clearly makes sense for OpenAI to at least think about its own infrastructure - at the moment it’s dependent on a somewhat fuzzy partnership with Microsoft, which is spending $80bn in the 12 months to June on datacenter capex, but building it to run AI on Azure, not just for OpenAI.

If OpenAI wants to be its own trillion dollar company (remember when it was a non-profit?) that can’t continue indefinitely. It wasn’t clear in the initial announcement, but on Wednesday the FT reported that this project would be for the exclusive use of OpenAI.

• Nvidia had a busy month. First off they revealed Project Digits - a ‘personal AI supercomputer’ which looks pretty existing. Their stock went up again at the beginning of the month, but then DeepSeek came along and Nvidia set a new record: Nvidia’s $589 Billion DeepSeek Rout Is Largest in Market History.

• ByteDance released an AI powered IDE: Trae.

• OpenAI released Operator an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. It is currently a research preview. They also just released o3-mini to combat DeepSeek's free model.

• Google is open sourcing the popular Pebble smartwatch. Hackers are excited about this one.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• If you have a child, this is going to be your new favourite thing: Bring childrend's books to life.

• Enjoy pretending you're a wizard.

• Trust me on this one... this is one of the coolest stories you will ever read.

• For all you space nerds out there: Space Sim.

• Click, be entertained, and stimulated. This is really funny.

• Someone created tetris inside a PDF. Here is a good discussion on how it works.

• Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world, and see where it ends up.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

A simple short story for this month's best resource, but one that I hope inspires you to get 2025 started on the right foot. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did: An Unreasonable Amount of Time.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• API Parrot: reverse engineer the HTTP APIs of any website, making life easier for developers looking to automate, integrate or scrape websites without public APIs.

• The first agentic IDE: Windsurf... will be interesting to see how people find this new IDE. Let me know if you like it!

• Here is how to acquire a new superpower today (I've tried it and it works!)

• Add pets to your VS code... but I still like my Sublime Text, and so does this person.

• Here is how to stop wasting time on useless websites.

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 an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our most popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.