Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

48th 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 Tim Ferriss and 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 June 2022 as a Web Developer…

StackOverflow Survey Results 🕺

Everyone's favourite yearly survey is out! Check out the results here.

Rust is on its seventh year as the most loved language with 87% of developers saying they want to continue using it.

We agree... Rust is pretty great. Rust also tied Python as the most wanted technology with TypeScript running a close second (...and yes, ZTM has a course on all of these).

Web3 Mania 👨‍🎤

With so much hype and hate around Web3, let's take a measured look at what it is and what it can do in this article. As always, focus on the tech, not on the get-rich-quick schemes.

Free Tools for Web Developers ✂️

For those of you who don't know, the ZTM team and I have curated our all-time best free resources and free tools here for you. One new one for this month:

• Component Encyclopedia - explore the world’s UI components to learn techniques that actually work

React News 💎

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

• An update from the React team React and the plans moving forward - What We've Been Working On – June 2022

• Are you on the Remix hype train? Do you have more than 5 React based stickers on your laptop? Then you will love the RemixConf2022 recap here

• A simple, scalable, and powerful architecture for building production ready React applications: Bulletproof React

• Notes on maintaining an internal React component library

SSG Over SSR 🤷

The server doesn't have to do anything except deliver the HTML to the client. Because of this, for users with a slow connection, it's a much faster experience to load a static site than it is to load a server-side rendered (SSR) site because the content has already been processed.

Static sites are also fast, even if the origin is slow. This is because there's no processing required on the origin for static sites — it just has to fetch and deliver the file.

So should you chose SSG over SSR?

Angular 14 Party 💃

For those die hard Angular fans, Angular 14 is out! For those keeping score, Angular is still maintaining the lead over the Fast and the Furious movie releases.

Check out the major changes here.

P.s. Here at ZTM we ar so on top of things, that we have already updated our Angular course to this latest version.

Microservices are so Fetch 💅

The mass adoption of microservices has forced more engineers to understand the implications of that decision within their systems... how do you manage distributed systems?

This visual + article goes over the 8 fallacies generally ignored or downplayed when discussing system design. I highly recommend this read.

How the Form Changed the Web 📝

This is a great read. How a little HTML widget gave us the all-powerful Amazon and Facebook. There's no closing Pandora's text box now.

How did the Form change the web?

Hydration Sucks 🚰

In web development, Hydration is a technique to add interactivity to server-rendered HTML. It’s a technique in which client-side JavaScript converts a static HTML web page into a dynamic web page by attaching event handlers to the HTML elements... but it's not really all that's cracked out to be.

AbortController ⚔️

A new feature of JS is the AbortController, and its AbortSignal. It enables some new development patterns, including AbortController to provide a fetch() you can abort early.

Learn all about it here.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

Can you make the world's most satisfying checkbox?

This is a great challenge to improve your design chops on the web.

Start off by reading this article, and then see if you can modify it to make it even better.

Show me what you come up with on twitter and tag @zerotomasteryio!

3rd Party Poopers 🧱

As a general rule, you should avoid 3rd party resources whenever possible.

This article explains what third-party resource requests really are and which common optimization strategies can help reduce the impact on the user experience.

By carefully considering how third-party requests will fit into your website during the design stage, you’ll be able to avoid the most significant negative impacts.

Safari 16 🐘

WebKit has had a big year, with over 162 new features and improvements shipping in WebKit browsers.

For those that don't know, Safari and Firefox are the last standing browsers to still compete against the monopoly of Chromium based browsers... stay strong.

CSS Day in Amsterdam 🌞

This group of developers attended CSS Day and took notes for us. How kind. If you love CSS then you will love this.

TC39 Gossip 🧘

There were several items on the agenda, this post focuses on feature proposals and their progress from the meeting that was held between 6-9th June 2022 (all about JavaScript).

But enough gossip! Check out the recenlty approved ECMA2022 features to be added to JavaScript land.

Bye Bye Atom, Hello Copilot 🪂

Everyone's 6th favourite code editor is saying goodbye. Github is officially sunsetting the code editor... so you should probably just switch to the best code editor... Sublime Text ;)

Buuuuut, in better news, Github Copilot (aka really good autocompletion tool) is now generally available for everyone to use. Just convince your employer to get it for you.

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...

• Glide Data Grid - Build the ultimate data grid with this handy library

• VSCodium - a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code

• BlueprintJS - a React-based UI toolkit for the web

• Fresh - a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity. Deno lovers rejoice!

• Vitest - a Vite-native unit test framework

News Around the World 🗺

• Hertzbleed Attack is another blow to Intel CPUs. The only prevention seems to be slowing down your processing power.

• The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta Reveals VR Headset Prototypes. Designed to Make VR ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’.

• I'm noticing a trend right now when it comes to tech hiring. A lot of companies are suspending some of their hiring. If you have a solid job right now, I recommend you consider staying put as the mobility between jobs we saw in the last couple of decades for tech workers may not keep going at the same pace

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• A Trail Tale... super cool website (the app is built with Unity WebGL wrapped in a vue.js wrapper)

• The Floppotron 3.0

• You are the top banker in charge of the central bank. Your role is to maximize economic potential by putting the right amount of money in circulation and to increase the GDP of your village: the number of apples it produces. Your only lever is to change the central bank interest rate... Good luck!

Best Resource of the Month ✅

This month's best resource comes from a StackOverflow discussion and a discussion that has been going on since the beginning of software engineering.

For any programmer who takes themselves seriously, this is a must read. Trust me.

Once you are done with that (ha! got you with 2 resources this month!), read this so you don't go dumb dumb: The Grug Brained Developer - A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained.

Trick of the Month 🌗

Have pets inside your VS Code.

Thanks for reading! Don't be shy now... Share this newsletter with your friends. 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.