[June 2023] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

60th 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 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 June 2023 as a Web Developer…

Respect The CSS 🙇‍♂️

As developers, we often default to JavaScript when we think of adding any functionality or behaviour to our website. But hold on there!

Did you know that CSS is constantly evolving, and the things you could only once do with JavaScript can now be done with CSS?

When you have the choice, it's always good to default to CSS... so what can it do now? Get ready to have your mind blown.

Want more? Here is another one.

React News 💎

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

Rethinking React best practices. A deep dive into the evolution of React from client-side view library to application architecture.
Learn to implement a very simplified version of React Server Components (RSC) from scratch. Here is the first part. If you want to keep nerding out on this, then read this too.
An overview of React Ecosystem in 2023. A lot of tools, A lot of options. But do you trust your team to make the right decisions?
React visual editor: Codux

React's Angular Moment 🍭

This was an excellent read this month.

I remember when Angular was all the rage, and then it was caught up in a flood of negativity when they updated to the new Angular 2.

In a way, React seems to be repeating history. Do you agree? Will it fall or flourish?

Hackernews Comments Of The Month 🍻

From sametmax:

I like the fact minimalist approaches, like svelte, htmx and alpine.js are getting more and more traction. I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.

So far I also survived:

xml is the future
let's use nosql for all the things
you must use the same language at the back and front
yes, your site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)
yes, your home page must be an SPA
you can't code anything without async
you can't live without a message queue
everything must become a micro service
of course you need a container for that
of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers
of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself
dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!
dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!

Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "you are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".

Here is another one from michaelteter:

Isn't the fundamental problem that LLM's don't actually understand anything (as greater concepts), but rather operate as complex probability machines?

My 2 month active experience with ChatGPT-4 gave me the following takeaways:

when it's right, it's amazing; and when you, the operator, can recognize the niche use case where it performs really well, it can be a game-changer (although you could have programmed a tool to do the same narrow task)
when it's a little wrong, you (the expert) can fix the issue and move on without friction
when it's any amount of wrong and you are less than an expert, or specifically you are completely unfamiliar with the topic, you can waste an immense amount of time researching the output and/or iterating with the system to refine the result

Initially I thought it was a 10:1 ratio of performance to effort.

But finally (as a developer) I settled on (1 to 1.5):1. It basically just changed the game for me from doing the actual hard work to working out how to tease the system into producing a reasonable result.

And in the process (same as with co-pilot) I started to recognize how it was leading me to change my habits to avoid thinking and effort and instead rely on an external brain.

If you could have a reliable external brain always available, that would be a fair trade. But when the external "brain" is unreliable and only available via certain interfaces, it's better to train yourself to be proactive, voracious (with respect to documentation), and tolerant of learning/producing cycles.

I once thought it would be a game-changer. Now I realize it is a game-changer, but in a similar way that offshoring was... it didn't improve or solve any problems, but it merely changed the work.

The biggest survey on AI

If you want even more stats on how programmers on using AI tools, check out our very first State of AI survey.

AI Stack For JavaScript 🍡

A16z, a famous VC fund did an analysis of AI stacks (coincidently they invest heavily in AI/LLMs startups which is why they would be interested in producing a list like this... $$$).

Here are the most popular tools to use in a AI Stack for JavaScript developers.

Svelte 4 👑

The popular #4 spot on the JavaScript framework war got an update to version 4! Check out all of the new things that it added here.

JavaScript Opinions 🌶

A clickbaity title but still worth watching: Why We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford - Inventor of JSON

Hype Cycles and XML 🪭

You do need the cloud, containers, nosql, go, rust and js build systems. Modern software requirements, customers’ expectations and incredible new features are not to be ignored.

Just not for everything.

Nothing is ever needed for everything. Read the full article here.

DevTools Triksta 🃏

Do you know all the tricks when it comes to browser DevTools? Of course not... but here are some great tips and tricks that can boost your productivity.

Build Your Own Docker 🧳

A cool little tutorial to teach you how Docker works under the hood. If you have a Linux machine you will have a good time with this one.

NextJS App Router Stuff 👣

The App Router is a new feature of NextJS. It represents a new foundation for the future of NextJS, so the developers decided to give the community an update on where it's headed next.

Advanced Command-Line Tools 🫨

If you have a Mac, this is going to be fun. There are a good number of macOS-specific command-line utilities that provide unique macOS functionality that you may not have known. Here are some of the interesting ones.

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...

Bun has some new updates: A few weeks ago, they launched the new JavaScript bundler in Bun v0.6.0. Now they are releasing a new feature that highlights the tight integration between Bun's bundler and runtime -> Bun Macros (Macros are a mechanism for running JavaScript functions at bundle-time. The value returned from these functions are directly inlined into your bundle).
Make React 70% faster... or so they say: Million - The Virtual DOM Replacement for React.
Hyper Fetch 5.0 is out! If you haven't heard of a tool and it's in v5 already is that a bad sign? Asking for a friend.
Cool logo: Panda CSS

News Around the World 🗺

A faster sorting algorithm was discovered using deep reinforcement learning (AI). This is impressive.
Unreal Engine is doing Unreal things with AI: Check this one out.

Big Tech News 🏢

The biggest news of the month is this: Apple Vision Pro release. Apple is known for quality and this does not disappoint. They will be opening up this platform for developers to build on top of. This is an opportunity to make a name for yourself while the space is still young (think the app store before all the apps). Keep an eye out on this space. Why is this a game changer? Watch this to find out.
Reddit had an interesting month. A lot of their communities went private for a few days in protest of Reddit's API changes. Reddit argues that they needed to update their API terms to fight the LLMs (think ChatGPT) using their data for free to train their models. Hot opinions on both sides of this one.
Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard... probably because of the possible lawsuits of using other people's code?
Google kills another product: Squarespace Enters Definitive Agreement to Acquire Google Domains Assets - Transfer Of Approximately 10 Million Domains.
Meta continues to release open source AI products: Voicebox - The first generative AI model for speech to generalize across tasks with state-of-the-art performance.
Did you forget about Snapchat? They're doing some AI chatbot things too.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

A fascinating read about how GPS works. It will blow your mind.
Can you beat the password game?

Best Resource of the Month ✅

If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that we keep talking about this over and over: Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software.

This is such an important topic, but for some reason, we as an industry overlook it over and over. History repeats itself and bad software will always be created.

However, you can be better and notice when you and your company is creating imaginary problems. Be smart, and don't always follow the trends.

Enjoy this month's best article!

Trick of the Month 🌗

Uncover Google's secret browser.
Create a professional resume in seconds.

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.