[July 2024] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 73rd 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 July 2024 as a Web Developer…

Is DRY Bad? 🧽

DRY – Don't Repeat Yourself. It's one of the first design principles engineers learn and we love to go wild with it... but is it actually good advice?

I agree with this article which explores this topic... it's not always black and white, and can sometimes lead to bad code.

What's New in ECMAScript 2024 🛍

A good recap (we covered this in last month's newsletter) of what’s new for JavaScript Developers in ECMAScript 2024.

React News 💎

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

How upgrading to React 18 energized The New York Times website and made it better. Some good tidbits in here. Like this kind of stuff? Here is how AirBnb did it as well.
At React Conf, React Native team updated the guidance on the best tool to get started building React Native apps: Using React Native frameworks, such as Expo, is now the recommended approach to create new apps. (Good thing ZTM already teaches using Expo in our React Native course. P.s here is everything that web developers need to know about building their first React Native application.
This 7 part series about software architecture and React apps is a great read. It will take you through a code base with lots of bad practices and refactor it step by step.
Redux is still the best tool for complex state management in your apps. Why? The maintainer tells you himself (from React Conf 2024). P.S. you can see all the React Conf 2024 talks here.
State of React just came out. Not much to report on other than people love using Vite.

Git Everywhere ⌛️

The story of Git. How it got started to where it is now. This is a fun little read about the tool that every single developer uses. It's a fascinating story.

Cancel A Promise ⛓️‍💥

How to Annul Promises in JavaScript. This article shows you how to create cancelable tasks in JavaScript with Promise.withResolvers and AbortController. Worth adding the skillset to your tool belt.

The End of Internet 🦾

OpenAI recently announced their gpt-4o mini model, at a price of $0.15 per 1 million input tokens, and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens. This extremely low cost AI model has just passed an inflection point. It's now possible to build dynamic, AI generated content entirely supported by ads... is this predicting the end of the internet?

Box Shadow Rabbit Hole 💅

Who knew there was so much to learn about box shadows? Here is more than you ever wanted to know about this CSS property.

The Best Rendering Strategy 🏆

Static Site Generation (SSG), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Client-Side Rendering (CSR), Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), and experimental Partial Prerendering (PPR).

So many acronyms and they all sound very complex... do you need them? Which one should you choose?

Web rendering has evolved from simple server-rendered HTML pages to highly interactive and dynamic applications, and there are more ways than ever to present your app to users.

Here is a guide on the pros and cons.

Big NodeJS News 🧃

Node is adding experimental support for TypeScript. What does this mean? A hackernews user sums it up nicely:

"If Node.js can run TypeScript files directly, then the TypeScript compiler won't need to strip types and convert to JavaScript - it could be used solely as a type checker. This would be similar to the situation in Python, where type checkers check types and leave them intact, and the Python interpreter just ignores them.

It's interesting, though, that this approach in Python has led to several (4?) different popular type checkers, which AFAIK all use the same type hint syntax but apply different semantics. However for JavaScript, TypeScript seems to have become the one-and-only popular type checker.

In Python, I've even heard of people writing types in source code but never checking them, essentially using type hints as a more convenient syntax for comments. Support for ignoring types in Node.js would make that approach possible in JavaScript as well."

Firefox Drama 🌶

Firefox presents itself as the first choice for data protection, but the new version collects data for advertisers by default. The community was not impressed with this change.

Notion's Data Lake 🚿

I love these type of stories that share ideas and thoughts on systems and architecture. In the past three years Notion’s data has expanded 10x due to user and content growth, with a doubling rate of 6-12 months.

Managing this rapid growth while meeting the ever-increasing data demands of critical product and analytics use cases, especially with the recent Notion AI features. It meant building and scaling Notion’s data lake.

Here’s how we they did it.

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...

es-toolkit - A modern JavaScript utility library that's 2-3 times faster and up to 97% smaller. It's a major upgrade to lodash.
ESLint is getting a big update - the most used linting library in our ecosystem has some big changes.
Astro 4.12 is out with Server Islands... I still don't know anyone that actually uses Astro.

News Around the World 🗺

A botched update by Crowdstrike, a security vendor, crashed millions of computers. It affected big industries like banking, finance and travel, which probably caused millions (if not billions) in damages. Oops. If you want to know what happened behind the scenes technically, this video will explain it all for you.
World's oldest cave art was found showing humans and pig. Pretty cool.
AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach... that's about 100+ million users.

Big Tech News 🏢

Meta, Google, Anthropic and Mistral all have a ‘top of line’ and ‘cheap’ models. Now OpenAI has joined, with GPT-4o Mini. The industry is consolidating around these big players, with each offering these 2 main products for different budgets.
OpenAI also hinting that they want to work on their own AI chips (it's going to cost a lot of money).
Meta released a paper on Meta 3D Gen: 3DGen, a new state-of-the-art, fast pipeline for text-to-3D asset generation... this is an ideal tool to use for VR and abviously Meta is interested in that market growing.
Mistral released a new Code Generation AI tool to compete with the likes of Github Copilot and Gemini... available under an Apache 2.0 license which is nice. If you want to add this to your VS Code editor, here is how to do it.
If you want to nerd out a bit: Intel Vs. Samsung Vs. TSMC.
Netflix released Maestro: Data/ML Workflow Orchestrator at Netflix.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Reverse Engineering TicketMaster's Rotating Barcodes.
Want to attend a space launch in real life? It's on my bucket list and here you have a guide to attending a space launch in person.
Solve a murder mystery using AI Chatbots. P.s. this is a great project idea you can build yourself.
The Best Programming Language You Haven't Heard Of: It Will Surprise You!
Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Who is hiring? Is the job market down? Is it booming? With the introduction of the AI hype, these questions seem to be asked more and more.

You can read sensationalized headlines on the web, but what does the data say?

Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" using GPT-4o & LangChain.

This is the resource of the month not only because of the interesting data, but also for showing you how to do this analysis yourself using Selenium and a bit of code.

Good news, looks like the industry is doing just fine ;).

Trick of the Month 🌗

Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut... yes you read that right.
Was the above not a useful trick of the month? Fiiiine, here is a more serious one that may help you: navigate and refactor your code with ease

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.