Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

59th 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 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 May 2023 as a Web Developer…

A Piece of History 🛶

Let's start this month's newsletter with a fun little story. It's a piece of history from the Web's beginnings.

The web’s most important decision: How the web ended up not being owned by anyone.

React News 💎

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

1. A walkthrough of how they built the Next.js website. Some interesting design decisions here.

2. In an ever expanding complexity of the React world, let's talk about React Server Components and how they work. Remember when React was easy?

3. React Canaries: Enabling Incremental Feature Rollout Outside Meta. React community now has an option to adopt individual new features as soon as their design is close to final, before they’re released in a stable version.

4. "React from Another Dimension".

5. A great explanation of how React Concurrency works.

Angular 16 🥁

Angular announced a pretty major update in Angular 16!

Don't let the hipsters on twitter fool you. With the ever expanding complexity of React, Angular has a solid following that isn't going away... and if anything, Angular is growing in popularity for long term maintainability of code.

They just announced this new version, and don't worry, ZTM is known for the most up to date courses so we've already updated our Angular course with v16. Yipeeey!

For those that love Angular: Top 25 Essential Angular Interview Questions + Answers

Monoliths Aren't Dinos 🦖

This is very important (see the Amazon news later in this newsletter).

Software architectures are not like the architectures of bridges and houses. After a bridge is constructed, it is hard, if not impossible, to change the way it was built.

Software is quite different, once we are running our software, we may get insights about our workloads that we did not have when it was designed. And, if we had realized this at the start, and we chose an evolvable architecture, we could change components without impacting the customer experience.

With every order of magnitude of growth you should revisit your architecture, and determine whether it can still support the next order level of growth.

And guess what? Monoliths are not dinosaurs.

Keep JavaScript Weird 🦦

We all know that JavaScript is a whole lot of mess and weirdness but we love JavaScript for it.

Here is a fun little article to showcase another weirdness of JavaScript... nobody writes JavaScript anymore.

Vercel Storage 🍯

With the demise of Heroku (if you have been following this newsletter you already know the story), easy storage solutions for your app especially for practicing on your small MVP apps has become scarce.

Luckily Vercel is here to save the day with some new offerings:

• Vercel KV: A serverless Redis solution that's easy and durable, powered by Upstash
• Vercel Postgres: A serverless SQL database built for the frontend, powered by Neon
• Vercel Blob: A solution to upload and serve files at the edge, powered by Cloudflare R2

ECMAScript 2023 🌶

The next JavaScript update brings smaller additions familiar from other languages, but there are more significant developments in the wings... here is a list of everything you need to know.

Learn to Prompt Inject 💉

Prompt Injection is a fancy way of saying "tricking the chat bot". In a fun little game, can you get Gandalf to reveal the password? There are levels and it gets harder and harder.

Try your hand at this challenge and tell your friends that you're a prompt injection specialist now.

P.S. this is a fun little example of what happens in real life with this technique.

Advice from a Legend 💾

Vint Cerf’s career advice for engineers. The Internet’s co-creator on humility, collaboration, and cultivating soft skills... we all need to read this.

All About Memory 🤿

Everything you ever wanted to learn about Memory in programming. You want to read this article all the way through, and you will become an expert. One of the best explanations I have found online.

Once you are done, read this: How Much Memory Do You Need to Run 1 Million Concurrent Tasks?

This article looks at memory consumptions of popular languages like Rust, Go, Java, C#, Python, Node.js and Elixir. Who wins?

Everything is Technical Debt ⏳

Am I an old jaded programmer? I don't know but this article really resonated with me this month.

My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated.

What do you think about this?

Node.js Performance 2023 🔋

This article aims to use scientific numbers to assess the state of Node.js’ performance as it reaches v20.

Is it getting better?

418 I'm a Teapot 🫖

I can't believe it took me this long to learn that this is an actual thing. I've been building APIs with a missing piece this entire time. Now we know.

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...

• NextJS 13.4 is out! The main bit of change is the stability for the App Router feature. Here is how to structure your app with the new App Router.

• Qwick just reached v1! Qwik is a full-stack web framework that brings a fundamentally new approach to delivering instant apps at scale.

• Bun has a new bundler! Because why not? Everyone is doing it.

• Our favourite, Deno has an update: Deno 1.34 - deno compile supports npm packages

News Around the World 🗺

• In an interesting bit of news, Mozilla (Firefox) purchased Fakespot... a company that detects fake AI generated content. Interesting move and not sure why this makes sense for Mozilla, but clearly AI generated content is a big problem to solve in the future.

Big Tech News 🏢

• This is the most important news of the month. I didn't see too many people talk about this, but to me, this has huge implications and something I have been harping on about for quite some time: Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%. Amazon moved from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application and helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs shocked pickachu. You can read some of the takes in this article.

• Microsoft just rolled our early access to Github Copilot Chat.

• Meta is joining the AI battle... Meta AI announces Massive Multilingual Speech code, models for 1000+ languages.

• Apple announces multibillion deal with Broadcom to make components in the USA.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Isn't this Adoorable?

• Go outside and build one of these today to let your inner kid out.

• Worms everywhere.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

"We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI."

A possible leaked document from Google reveals to us whether we should be worried about AI, but more importantly what the real power of the web is. Not to sound too much like I'm making you click links, but the answer may surprise you.

This was a piece of news that everyone talked about this month that you cannot miss.

Once you are done with the above, read this.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• A fun way to learn how to work with APIs, but also play a game!

• Badgers: Fast and clean SVG badges for your projects

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.