[March 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 81st 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 March 2025 as a Web Developer…

CSRF vs CORS 🫂

CSRF stands for Cross-Site Request Forgery. It was rather popular in the earlier internet but now it’s almost a non-issue thanks to standard prevention mechanisms built into most of popular web frameworks.

The forgery is to make user click on a form that will send a cross-site request. The protection is to check that the request didn’t come from a third-party site.

CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. It’s a part of HTTP specification that describes how to permit certain cross-site requests. This includes preflight requests and response headers that state which origins are allowed to send requests.

Here is a full breakdown for you, and why it matters that you know both well.

How Much JavaScript? 🪖

Updated with new figures, have a look at how JavaScript was used in 2024 . How do developers deliver JavaScript to the users in 2024 and what are some way to optimize the increasing payload?

This is a great one to read for this month.

React News 💎

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

1. The URL is a great place to store state in React. Sometimes, the best place to store state is right in the URL. It’s simple, practical, and often overlooked. Let’s explore why it’s worth considering. Who knew!?

2. How the New York Times navigated the shift from Enzyme to React Testing Library.

3. A lot of drama with NextJS this month. First they created this nice guide on building APIs with NextJS. But they then released an update of NextJS that had a big security hole and had to fix it asap before too many people got mad at them.

4. React trends for 2025 to be aware of.

TypeScript 10x 🫦

TypeScript just got 10x faster... wait, actually?

Microsoft has said that "we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage."

How do they do it? By porting and rewriting it all in Go(lang).

Cursor for Coding 🦾

Here is a great writeup of an engineer that uses Cursor at their job with tips on how you can use it to boost your productivity.

There is a great discussion on hackernews around this article and what people are doing with AI coding tools.

Frontend Treadmill 🏃‍♀️

This is an important read especially for those with less than 5 years of experience working on big projects.

If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.

SQL PD 👮‍♂️

Want to learn SQL in a fun way? More fun than the ZTM SQL Bootcamp?

No such thing... but here is the second best option: SQL PD. This is similar to the SQL Murder mystery game I shared in last month's newsletter.

State of VueJS 🧚

An update on everything VueJS and the strong ecosystem that continues to grow around it. If you work with Vue or are planning to use it, you need to be aware of this State of VueJS 2025 report.

The Science of Troubleshooting 👨‍🔬

This is a great read for a skill you will use throughout your career: Troubleshooting.

It's not just scratching your head, googling the error message, and talking to a duck.

Here is how to do it properly.

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...

• The team at TikTok announced Lynx - an open source project that will try and compete with tools like React Native and Flutter, for building native apps across Android and iOS.

• Rsdoctor 1.0 - this is a build analyzer tool that looks very promising.

News Around the World 🗺

• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest at least $100 billion more in chip-manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next several years.

• Taara is spinning out of X (part of Alphabet/Google, not to be confused with X/Twitter) to become an independent company with a mission to bring high-speed, affordable and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light.

• Big news in the world of copyrighted content and AI: US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• Apple announced the M3 Ultra. 512GB of unified memory is big news. Why? This is incredibly practical for running large AI models locally ("600 billion parameters"), and Apple's approach of integrating this much efficient memory on a single chip could make it the best AI laptops out there for the every day programmer.

• Mistral announced the new Mistral OCR: an Optical Character Recognition API that sets a new standard in document understanding. Unlike other models, Mistral OCR comprehends each element of documents—media, text, tables, equations—with unprecedented accuracy and cognition. It takes images and PDFs as input and extracts content in an ordered interleaved text and images.

• One of the biggest acquisitions ever and an indication that the cybersecurity field is a big and important field of the future. Alphabet/Google is buying Wiz for $32 billion in its biggest deal to boost cloud security. If you want to jump into this field, ZTM has a career path to get you hired in cybersecurity.

• Anthropic's Claude (my favourite LLM) can now search the web.

• OpenAI released an image generator with GPT‑4o that has everyone online talking. It also has audio models now and are priced quite competitively with their competitors.

• Some big Chinese AI model announcements too: DeepSeek 3 is under MIT license now, and Qwen2.5-VL-32B is out. Both are worth looking at.

• Musk's social media firm X bought by his AI company (xAI), valued at $33 billion. Who knows what's going on at this point.

• Google had some big announcements:

1. Gemini 2.5 is out

2. Gemini Robotics. It brings AI into the physical world of robotics and combines two of the fastest growing fields right now. Here is a youtube playlist of all the things robots can do with this now.

3. Gemma 3: The most capable model (according to them) you can run on a single GPU or TPU.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon. Here are the beautiful pictures.

• Travel through time and figure out which events you landed in. Try to beat my top score of 16,000 points on your first try.

• Pop the bubble and waste time at work.

• Multiplayer Minesweeper will become your new addiction. Also a great project to try and build on your own.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

A great discussion on the current state of LLMs and their potential from people that actually know what they are talking about.

This is a great thread for you to read and understand the current value of LLMs instead of reading another sensational AI blog post or another youtube video from that famous YouTuber with no experience.

Enjoy the discussion and be smarter and more informed.

Once you are done with the above, read this Career Advice for 2025 for programmers.

Finally, once you are done with those two, read this from one of the most respected software developers in the industry, Martin Fowler.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Generate impressive-looking terminal output to look busy when your boss walk by your computer. You're welcome.

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.