[March 2024] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

69th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter

If it’s your first time here, welcome, keep reading. If you're a long time reader, welcome back, you can skip to the next section to dive right into this month's newsletter.

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 March 2024 as a Web Developer…

Eloquent JavaScript 4 🤓

A classic JavaScript book that a lot of people love has released its 4th version: Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition.

It's free for everyone to read online. Back in the day I remember using it to learn JavaScript too!

React News 💎

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

A compiler for React that optimizes components and hooks for performance and readability: React Unforget, looks promising.
Let's keep the performance train rolling: Million Lint is a VSCode extension that keeps your React website fast. It identifies slow code and provides suggestions to fix it.
Remember how the React Team discussed that they are working on a new React Compiler last month? Well, this is how it would work.

JSR Launch 🧳

JavaScript has become the world’s default programming language. Running in browsers and on mobile devices, robots, and servers, you can use JavaScript to program just about anything.

Node was a major part of this transformation over the last 15 years, but you can’t talk about the success of Node without mentioning the equally incredible success of npm. With over 2.5 million packages and about 250 billion downloads in the last 30 days alone, it is arguably the world’s most successful package registry.

But what if NPM could be better? That's the goal of JSR - the JavaScript Registry and it's built by the Deno team.

Vercel's New Thing 🧞‍♂️

Last October, Vercel launched v0.dev, a generative UI design tool that converts text and image prompts to React UIs and streamlines the design engineering process.

This month, they are open sourcing v0's Generative UI technology with the release of the Vercel AI SDK 3.0. Developers can now move beyond plaintext and markdown chatbots to give LLMs rich, component-based interfaces. Looks cool.

Who Runs the World? JavaScript 🧌

A fun article from Wired about our dear friend JavaScript.

Programming nerds may laugh at JavaScript, but.. Look how far you’ve come, JavaScript, hopscotching across different eras of the internet, rising from a laughingstock to the lingua franca of the web. Well done, you ridiculous language. If I am being simulated by you, so be it.

WebSockets vs Server-Sent-Events vs Long-Polling vs WebRTC vs WebTransport 🪢

Yes, that's a ridiculously long title for this section, but it pretty much describes this excellent article that compares all of the above technologies for server-client communication.

Guarantee you will learn something new.

NodeJS Story 🩲

This is a beautifully shot, and a fun weekend watch for those of us who love using Node, or you know, just love programmer stories in general.

Node.js: The Documentary | An origin story by Honeypot.

How to Build a GPT 🧑🏻‍💻

A fun video series to learn how GPTs work.

Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need implements the forward pass of GPT2 (an ancestor of ChatGPT that was state of the art only a few years ago) entirely in Excel using standard spreadsheet functions.

This same Transformer architecture is the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many other LLMs, so it's a fun way to learn the fundamentals of all these A.I. tools.

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...

Storybook 8 is here! More features than anybody knows what to do with, but still a great tool.
MistCSS: Write React components using CSS only.
Display APIs compatibility across different JavaScript runtimes.
JS-torch: A JavaScript library like PyTorch, built from scratch.

News Around the World 🗺

This is an insane story. Some developer just saved A LOT of damage by finding a very complicated backdoor. The story is very interesting so I recommend you read it all here: Inside the failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally — that got caught by chance

Big Tech News 🏢

OpenAI and Elon Musk have beef. And to be honest, it's way too boring for me to read this article, but for those that like this kind of drama, here's OpenAI's side.
A lot of Apple news this month. First up, the fight between Apple and Web Apps (Progressive Web Apps) continues. Second, a great article about the Vision Pro and what it got right over Meta's Oculus. The synopsis: Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system, while Meta has made an app launcher for immersive Unity/Unreal apps for vanilla Android. But the biggest Apple news of all is that the U.S. Sued Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly. There's that anti-trust lawsuit everyone was waiting on.
Nvidia had some big announcements this month, including just how much money they make (hint: it's a lot), and the biggest news of all: The Blackwell A.I. Chip. Meanwhile, Intel receives $8.5 Billion in grants to build chip plants in the U.S... must be nice.
YouTube had an announcement: a new tool in Creator Studio requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content – content a viewer could easily mistake for a real person, place, or event – is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI.
Databricks released their own open LLM: DBRX. It will compete with Mixtral, LLaMa (Meta), and Grok (Twitter/X).
Rumours say that Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-center project.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned What Life Would Look Like in the Year 2000
Ever wanted to throw a server? There's a championship for that.
Infinitely zoomable Game of Life.

Let's Talk Devin 🧝🏻

This month was all about Devin. The new A.I. powered software engineer by Cognition Labs that got all the Junior Devs to have an existential crisis.

Is this something you should be worried about?

Aldo from ZTM did a little breakdown for you 👇.

This leads me to our Best Resource of the Month section next below...

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Will AI take over your job? At this point, it's getting exhausting hearing people ask this question. Luckily for you, two people this month did some great research to answer your burning question with some SCIENCE:

And in case you forgot, these are my thoughts on A.I. and the future of tech.

Trick of the Month 🌗

Do you use Postman or Insomnia for your API needs? How about you try this new tool that might blow your mind (and not your API)..
Difftastic is a CLI diff tool that compares files based on their syntax, not line-by-line...this looks veeeery promising.
CLI tool for saving complete web pages as a single HTML file.
Voice to Text Editor/Code Editor. Keep an eye out on this company.

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 our popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.