[May 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 83rd 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 May 2025 as a Web Developer…

Plain Vanilla Web 🍦

This is a must read for all web developers. It's an overview of the major techniques used to make websites and web applications without making use of build tools or frameworks, with just an editor, a browser, and web standards... something many have forgotten what to do because of web frameworks.

If you're serious about your career you need to check this out.

A Unique Way To Job Hunt 🎳

This is a novel idea if you want to get hired in the A.I./MCP space as a full stack developer. This person did the following:

I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants.

Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions.

MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my professional background and a set of tools, prompts and resources to help explore my skills and experiences.

The code is open source, so you can create your own AI-driven resume server.

It may not be the most practical thing to do, but I bet it would impress a lot of employers looking to hire in this space. You're welcome for the tip.

React News 💎

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

A fun little guide: GitHub for Beginners: Building a React App with GitHub Copilot
Some important Remix/React-Router updates are happening

A Little Generator Action 🪇

I like the "syntactic sugar" JavaScript's seen over the past decade (arrow functions, template literals, destructuring assignment, etc.). I think it's because most of these features solved real pain points for me (some of which I didn't even know I had). The benefits were clear and there was plenty of opportunity to wield them.

But there are some oddballs in there... like generator functions. They've been around just as long as other key ES2015+ features, but their practicality hasn't exactly caught on. You might not even immediately recognize... this article will show you the magic.

Deno's Demise 🦕

"There’s been some criticism lately about Deno - about Deploy, KV, Fresh, and our momentum in general. You may have seen some of the criticism online; it’s made the rounds in the usual places, and attracted a fair amount of attention."

However, the creator of NodeJS and Deno, Ryan Dahl, lets us know that Deno isn't going anywhere.

JavaScript Turns 30 🎂

Now officially going through a midlife crisis, JavaScript turns 30 this month and we have a fun little read to recap the history and the adventures of JavaScript so far: A Brief History of JavaScript.

Converting Strings in JavaScript 🚄

Who knew such a simple thing had so many options and issues. Although the topic may not sound super interesting, this is a great read and will give you a bit of extra insight into how JavaScript works: Converting values to strings in JavaScript has pitfalls.

Reinvent the Wheel 🎡

One of the most common pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel... but is this always true?

This article will make you think.

LLMs, For Senior+ Engineers 👨‍🔬

Programming with LLMs is both promising and frustrating. While these AI assistants can help with coding and debugging, they often waste time too. Yet for senior engineers, pair programming with LLMs shows real potential.

Here are the best resources to show you the current best practices.

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...

One of the best animation libraries for the web GSAP got a new update with 3.13!
Mantine v8.0.0 is out- Build fully functional accessible web applications faster than ever – Mantine includes more than 120 customizable components and 70 hooks.
Node v24 is officially out - everyone's favourite JavaScript runtime.
The famous Have I Been Pwned website got a 2.0 update!
TypeScript Native Preview is out - you will be able to use npm to get a preview of the native TypeScript compiler which achieves 10x speeds.
Angular v20 is here!

News Around the World 🗺

Redis is Open Source again. Redis has had a lot of drama in the last few years, and this move hopes to restore some of the community goodwill.
Alchemists rejoice! They were right all long that you can create Gold: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
World’s first personalized gene-editing treatment for a baby happened this month. The technique used on a 9½-month-old boy with a rare condition has the potential to help people with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases.
Crypto world is doing crypto world things.
Login and password details for Apple, Google and Meta accounts found in huge data breach of 184 million accounts. Oops.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

Apple was found guilty for antitrust. The iPhone maker has been ordered to loosen App Store restrictions finally.
Anthropic had 2 big announcements with the Claude 4 release and the release of Claude Integrations. This is what they had to say about it:

Last November, we launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard connecting AI apps to tools and data. Until now, support for MCP was limited to Claude Desktop through local servers. Today, we're introducing Integrations, allowing Claude to work seamlessly with remote MCP servers across the web and desktop apps. Developers can build and host servers that enhance Claude’s capabilities, while users can discover and connect any number of these to Claude.

When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work—understanding project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge—and can take actions across every surface. Claude becomes a more informed collaborator, helping you execute complex projects in one place with expert assistance at every step.

Anthropic also released web search capabilities on their API which opens a whole new world of possibilities.
OpenAI Reaches Agreement to Buy Startup Windsurf for $3 Billion. Who knew a fork of VS Code would make so much money. Incredible timeline to a $3B exit (below), but also interesting that developer tools space is heating up because AI ISN'T replacing programmers. Instead, it's making them more productive.

Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.

Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.

Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.

May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI

Interestingly OpenAI also released Codex - A cloud-based software engineering agent that can work on many tasks in parallel.
Oh and apparently OpenAI is making (funding) too much money because they also just bought Jony Ive's (famous for desinging Apple products) AI device startup for $6.5 billion.
Google had their annual I/O event and made a couple of big announcements. Most important to you, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview is out - Expect meaningful improvements for front-end and UI development, alongside improvements in fundamental coding tasks such as transforming and editing code, and creating sophisticated agentic workflows.
Microsoft made a shocking announcement that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. They also turned GitHub Copilot in VS Code into an Open-Source product.
A fun little AI oopsie: Over a year after claiming that its AI chatbot could do the work of 700 representatives, Klarna is turning back to people to help with customer service work.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

This is reaaaaally cool. Explore new styles of music with Suno v4.5. All this music is AI generated, but if I didn't tell you that, would you know?
Check out these amazing internet artifacts.
Minecraft built with no JavaScript, just pure CSS. Wow.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Is A.I. making us dumber? Seriously, think about it and check out the best resource of the month here.

I think there is real concern here. You will need to make a conscious decision to use AI tools to improve your productivity, but without costing your ability to reason, be creative, and develop critical thinking.

Once you watch the video above, read this: Thoughts on Thinking.

This is your warning.

P.S. I wanted to put this as the resource of the month but you all would have yelled at me: Owls in Towels

Trick of the Month 🌗

Bring back Clippy and combine it with the power of LLMs. Welcome back to the future.

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.