[July 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 85th 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 2025 as a Web Developer…

Code As Bottleneck 🍾

A very short piece but a valuable one to read this month. The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs.

But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever

Writing code was never the bottleneck.

New in ECMAScript 2025 🍩

Everything you need to know about the new specification and what is coming to JavaScript so you can stay up to date with the language: Here's what's new in ECMAScript 2025.

React News 💎

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

1. React Still Feels Insane And No One Is Talking About It. I tend to agree... but it's still the biggest player in the game.

2. Pretty big news from the React Native team: they are bringing Node-API, the native module system developed and widely used in Node.js, into React Native. Node-API allows native code to interface with JavaScript in a runtime-independent and stable way.

3. The history of React through code. If you're a React developer, this is a good one to read to see how it has evolved over time.

4. React compiler docs where just updated if you would like to learn about it with the latest info.

Vercel Ship 🛼

Vercel has spent a lot of money buying up "stuff" around the web dev space and they had an event this month were they announced a bunch of things. Shocking nobody, mostly AI tools. Here is the recap.

Oh they also bought NuxtLabs.

Crypto 101 🔑

Before you think this is about buying lambos and going to the moon while doing absolutely zero work, this is about cryptography.

Crypto 101 is an introductory course on cryptography, freely available for programmers of all ages and skill levels. It's very technical and very informative. It's also not gambling.

OOps Commits ⛓️‍💥

A pretty smart way to collect bug bounty and collect GitHub commit secrets. GitHub Archive logs every public commit, even the ones developers try to delete. Force pushes often cover up mistakes like leaked credentials by rewriting Git history. GitHub keeps these dangling commits, from what we can tell, forever.

Here is what this one user did with this.

Fun Weekend Project 🎪

This may be the greatest project idea ever.

Mental Models For Engineers 📔

How do you become a senior engineer? What distinguishes these engineers — the senior ones in spirit, not just in title — isn’t a fixed set of knowledge, tools, or even experience in years.

It’s how they see. The lens they use to model the complexity of systems, tradeoffs, and people.

If you could look inside their head, you’d find three dominant forces shaping their mental architecture: focus, friction and feedback.

AI Makes You Unproductive 🚧

Interesting study shows that we overestimate productivity gains from using AI tools.

This is worth a thought.

Database Hype in 2025 💾

A good overview of what people are saying about databases in 2025. The analysis was done using 1.8 Million Hacker News headlines. Some interesting trends in there and what you need to know about the databse landscape.

Remember WASM? 🏭

Here is a good recap of WASM and what you can do with it. With all the AI hype, we forget some of the cool tech that we can now use on the web.

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...

• Deno 2.4 is here and the bundle is back!

• Untitled UI React - the world’s largest collection of open-source React components built with Tailwind CSS and React Aria. Just copy, paste, and build.

News Around the World 🗺

• Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered... using AI.

• Jack Dorsey, billionaire founder of Twitter and Square, released Bitchat: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet required, no servers, no phone numbers.

• Microsoft's SharePoint got hacked big time.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• Grok 4 was launched with some issues, but we don't get political in this newsletter. Performance looks quite good.

• Windsurf has a heck of a month: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google. Meanwhile I guess the product/code is sold to Cognition as they signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf.

• Amazon finally launches their own agentic IDE that works alongside you from prototype to production: Kiro

• Perplexity announced a new browser: Comet

• Not to get outdone, it was leaked that OpenAI is planning to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome.

• OpenAI had two other big announcements: 1. ChatGPT agent - ChatGPT now thinks and acts, proactively choosing from a toolbox of agentic skills to complete tasks for you using its own computer. 2. Study Mode - A new way to learn in ChatGPT that offers step by step guidance instead of quick answers.

• Mistral announced an advanced Le Chat.

• Qwen3-Coder is out with an open coding assistant like Claude Code.

• Nvidia briefly touched $4 trillion market cap for first time ever for a company. There is a lot of money in AI.

• Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12 billion in early-stage funding

... anymore indications that we are in an AI bubble?

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• View & cycle through The Moon's phases day to day - rendered in ASCII art.

• Do you know what a sprite is? I didn't until I saw this video, and now my mind is blown.

• How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?

• Here is how a screen works, you nerd.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

A lot of AI articles lately are very predictable and repetitive.

This article however, has a fresh perspective and is well written that I recommend everyone check it out this month.

We are in an inflection point in our industry. Make sure you're not following the herd blindly.

Be the observer and make wise decisions in order to stand out.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Be like Apple, glass3d generator

• Super nerdy, trick of the month: Get the location of the ISS using DNS

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.