[May 2024] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

71st 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 May 2024 as a Web Developer…

New Debugger has Appeared 🍓

A cool little tool just popped up on the scene for developers: Jam. It auto-captures all the info web developers need to debug including: Device + browser, Console logs, Network logs, Repro steps, Backend tracing, AI debugger with just a single click.

Oh, and it's free. Going to try it this weekend.

React News 💎

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

The new React Compiler coming to v19 is all the rage, and the React team just updated their docs to let you learn and play with this new feature.
A big announcement about Remix. Looks like they are getting a new branding updated and (kind of), merging with React Router. Remix has always just been a layer on top of React Router - and the team that works on both, has planned to release Remix v3 as React Router v7. Read more about it here.
React 19 doesn't have a release date yet, but it will be coming this year, and this is my favourite post so far about the changes and possible benefits.

How A.I. Changes Coding 🦾

A great discussion from the programming community on how AI tools like Copilot has changed the programming world and how coding is being taught. Mixed opinions on this one, but some interesting insights and tips/tricks in here.

New CSS Tricks 💅

Did you know that in the last few years CSS has evolved with a ton of new features that make your life easier?

Here is a great breakdown of some of these features.

PHP Doesn't Suck Anymore 🛹

Everyone loves to hate on PHP (including myself), but most of these critics haven't looked at PHP since 2012, and a lot has changed since then. Take a look at the language changes that have happened since PHP 5.4 was released.

We even released a PHP course recently on ZTM with all of these improved upgrades in the language.

Weekend Project Idea 🧪

Love animations and love math? What? you don't love math!? Don't worry, this is still an interesting and fun blog post.

Use this as the weekend project to build some cool animations to add to your portfolio!

More JSDoc 👣

Last month, we talked about the new JSDoc built by the Deno team as an alternative to npm. They have now written a great guide on how to document your JavaScript package. Go check it out as there is some great info there.

Promise.withResolvers() 🤞

A new proposal for ECMAScript 2024 feature. We will see if this will be added this year to JavaScript, but if you want to be ahead of the game, here is a detailed post on how this new feature will work.

Design Docs at Google 📑

One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs.

These are relatively informal documents that the primary author or authors of a software system or application create before they embark on the coding project.

The design doc documents the high level implementation strategy and key design decisions with emphasis on the trade-offs that were considered during those decisions.

Here is how Google uses design docs before any big coding project.

Top ChatGPT Customizations 🪞

The top suggestion in this thread is really good. Here is how to customize the GPT prompt to make it as useful as possible. Nice little 2024 life hack.

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...

Tailwind CSS team announced Headless UI v2.0 for React
Angular v18 is here!

News Around the World 🗺

Sure, maybe some won't consider it news, but I found this article absolutely fascinating and it will undoubtedly make you question the future of whatever you call creativity and art. Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse
Geopolitical news: nothing happened and everyone is getting along.

Big Tech News 🏢

Amazon has entered the Generative A.I game. Amazon Q is an AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development. They recently announced Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Q in QuickSight as tools similar to the ones offered by Microsoft and Google.
Apple just announced the new M4 chip. Their strategy is clear and this hackernews user put it best: In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency. If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.
Another bit of Apple news that looks super promising/interesting because of their VR/AR play: Apple announces new accessibility features, including Eye Tracking, Music Haptics, and Vocal Shortcuts.
OpenAI announced the big thing: GPT-4o. Aldo made a video for you explaining why this is such a big deal.
Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Google announced Gemini Flash: a lightweight model, optimized for speed and efficiency. Google also announce Veo: a new generative video model.

We are now firmly into the ‘feeds & speeds’ phase of generative AI model deployment, with half-a-dozen players now adding multimodal, touting their AI chips (if they have them) and offering a range of models with different price performance/speed trade-offs - generally, there is the frontier model (best results), and then a large and more efficient production model, something smaller and cheaper/faster, and then whatever they can squeeze onto mobile. They all have a benchmark showing they’re in the lead, but there are no moats.

-Benedict Evans

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

What can you do with a single <div>? Apparently a lot.
Pluck strings and play some music y'all.
Terminal text effects that make you look like a real hacker.
This looks promising. Anyone can now make movies with Kino

Best Resource of the Month ✅

This one is unlike any of the previous resources I have shared in the past newsletters.

However, before you scroll away and ignore this one... trust me on this: if you are in the tech world, just by reading this article you will probably be more knowledgable about semiconductors than 99% of the population out there.

It's valuable to know how these things that run our world are made and work.

Read it, and reap the benefits (it's also just super fascinating to see how smart humans are that come up with this stuff... meanwhile I can't figure out how to center a button).

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab.

Trick of the Month 🌗

If this actually works, you all owe me a drink: How to get more interviews with this little trick.
Secret Llama: Secret Llama is a free and fully private chatbot. Unlike ChatGPT, the models available here run entirely within your browser which means: 1 - Your conversation data never leaves your computer. 2 - After the model is initially downloaded, you can disconnect your WiFi. It will work offline.

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.