Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

41st 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 Tim Ferriss and 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 November 2021 as a Web Developer…

So I Broke My Computer 🏚

This newsletter is one week behind the regular release schedule for you... don't be mad at me though... my laptop decided to stop turning on last week. I also happened to be in a very remote location on a little vacation. Long story short, I had to order a new laptop, re-install and set up everything, and I'm finally back in the country to bring you this newsletter. Let me know if anybody wants a really expensive 1.5 year old Mac Book Pro which is now an excellent paperweight or frisbee.

P.S. since we're into December... guess what: JavaScript turned 26 year old recently! This is what people said when it first came out.

Free Tools For Web Developers ✂️

Some tools and assets to help you build your next project since we are best friends by now (unless this is your first time reading my articles… in that case let’s take things slow):

1. Super cool app icon generator
2. Free 3D stock images for your next app
3. Turn your code into awesome pictures
4. Create your all in one developer page with this tool
5. Turn images into cartoons
6. Burst away
7. Free icons for all your projects

For those of you who don't know, the ZTM team and I list our all-time best free resources here for you. Or... you can go back and read all 40 of the previous issues of this newsletter. That's a joke. Don't do that!

VSCode vs Fleet ☠️

Watch out VS Code... JetBrains just came out with Fleet. A new code editor... see if you can get early access to try it out. This could be a game changer and might one day make me decide to finally switch from my beloved Sublime Text.

React News 💎

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

• Remix was all the hype this past month. It joins frameworks like Next.js, Redwood.js and others to take over the higher level abstraction space of building React apps. Will it make a splash?

• Next.js 12 came out and everybody got excited... here at ZTM, we got excited too and we built a whole Next.js course! But as I always say, latest isn't always everything, and it's all about context: Next.js 12 Performance Test: Builds Appear to be Slower, Not Faster

• React Conf is happening! They will usually post the talks on their youtube channel a few days later.

• Want to build a Shopify ecommerce store? Well, a new framework has entered the scene - Hydrogen: A React Framework For Dynamic, Contextual And Personalized E-Commerce

• Have a React Interview coming up? Then you should practice beforehand using this guide.

• Oh, and in case you didn't hear, React 18 is in beta.

Everything On The Web 🔥

If you have a desktop app, you may be losing out to companies like Slack, Discord, Figma and now Photoshop who are putting their applications on the web so everybody around the world can access their tools as long as they have a browser. Here is the story of how Photoshop didn't want to lose out to Figma so they decided to port their heavy duty desktop app to the web. The future is the web.

Web Developer Secrets 🚧

This article was making the rounds last month for good reason. Developer tool secrets that shouldn't be secrets. With a title like that, I dare you to not click the link. Some good tips in there.

Image Component Zen 🎑

Images are everywhere. It's what makes our apps come to life. As a web developer, you will always need to build image components throughout your career. But what is the best way to build an image component? Here is the perfect way.

Big Month for Angular 🛡

Don't let the twitter hipsters fool you. Angular is alive and very very strong in the enterprise world. This month saw Angular 13 come out and an Angular core team legend step down after 10+ years in the seat.

So You Want To Trie JavaScript? 📜

A nice and short article on how the autocomplete features we all love on the web are created using a data structure called Trie. Learn about it and play around with your own autocomplete feature.

Rust Is The Future of JavaScript 🧱

There is a reason we love Rust here at ZTM. Rust is a fast, reliable, and memory-efficient programming language. It's been voted the most loved programming language six years in a row by stackoverflow. Created by Mozilla, it's now used at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for systems infrastructure, encryption, virtualization, and more low-level programming.

Why is Rust now being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more? Read the article here.

And if you haven't already read it, check out Why You Should Learn Rust.

Arrays Deep Dive 🧙‍♂️

The simple array is probably the most popular data structure in programming. It's a straightforward yet powerful tool — it lets you represent an ordered list of items with fast random access. It doesn't matter if you're looking for index 1 or index 500 — with the array, both accesses take the same amount of time.

If you've been a developer for a while, you probably use arrays on a daily basis without thinking too much about them. But have you ever wondered how arrays actually work?

JavaScript Backdoor 🐝

If you want to really nerd out on something, here is a JavaScript backdoor that researches recently discovered. Can you spot it? Don't worry, I couldn't spot it either.

Why AMP Was Bad For Google 🕴

The story of how Google lost trust with the news publishers by forcing them to use something that everyone hated on the web: AMP

Weekend Project Ideas 🧰

Check this out. This article shows you how to create breathtaking 3D animations using React Three Fiber (R3F). You will walk through setting up a stage, creating geometry, adding lighting and enabling post-processing effects. What’s more, you’ll get to learn by recreating the animation below from scratch. Pretty cool stuff.

My Favourite Style Guide 🦹

I remember when this first came out. Ever since then, I have used it in all my major projects. They are constantly improving it and you should take a look as it will help you write cleaner code.

Vercel + Svelte 🧪

In another move to show what VC money can do to all these JavaScript based companies popping up, Vercel hired the creator of Svelte full time. There is a formula happening in the industry:

1. Start JS project
2. Get VC funding
3. Hire people with large twitter following
4. Profit?

Can't wait to see JSFuck (don't worry it's safe to click) get acquired.

How To Think Like a Programmer 🧠

This person is an example of a great programmer. Why? They are able to demonstrate their thought process and problem solving skills. Nobody likes a know it all, but everybody likes a smart and emotionally intelligent programmer. Take notes people.

What's Ruby Up To? ♦️

Everyone's favourite programming language in the 2000s. What are they up to? Some pretty exciting things apparently (Fun fact: Ruby was my first programming language).

Fun Way to Learn RegEx 🧠

Nobody likes writing RegEx. Somehow this makes it fun to learn though. Give it a try.

Publish Your Webapp to App Store 🥶

A great overview of what it takes to put your web based application on the app store using PWA tech. This is an article that takes into account the latest changes in the Progressive Web App world. Enjoy the read.

New Libraries and Tools 🗿

Just because we had a ton of these this month, I've added them into this section. Check out these shiny new/interesting things:

• Yarn 3.1 is here. The NPM killer that never really killed NPM.

• LittleJS - The Tiny JavaScript Game Engine That Can.

• React Router v6 is here with some big changes. Don't worry, we are already working on updating our ZTM React course with all the new changes. New videos and lectures will be coming out very soon! In the meantime, here is a great tutorial.

• Here is a great tool to keep track of all the ECMAScript proposals.

• Volta may be the future. Watch out NVM.

• Floating UI - Powerful positioning primitives.

News Around the World 🗺

• Portugal bans bosses texting staff after-hours.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Microsoft is bringing two strong forces together. At its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced an update to Excel that brings a new JavaScript API to the spreadsheet app. With this new API, developers will be able to create custom data types and functions based on them.

• Youtube is removing the Dislike button so that we can be less angry online. Thoughts?

• Jack has left twitter to work full time on his other company: Square, which is now renamed to Block.

• UK and the US were on a hot streak:

• They paused the Nvidia/ARM takeover, and this week the US FTC says it will sue to stop the deal.
• They ordered FB to sell Giphy. Facebook announced its $315m acquisition of Giphy in May 2020; the UK CMA proposed this summer that Facebook be obliged to sell it, and this week that decision was confirmed.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• How to grow cool crystals at home.

• This person had way too much time on his/her hands.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

We have to talk about Web3 because this past month everybody and their dogsitter is talking about how Web3 is the future of the web. Is it? Will it be? I'm not sure. What I can tell you is that it's always good to analyze from afar, observe, learn and decide for yourself. This is my favourite article on the topic thus far: Notes on Web3

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Compare JavaScript snippets to see which snippet has better performance.

• Make your README profile look cool with some custom components

• Identify NPM libraries included in Javascript files with this tool.

• Super cool git tool to do cool git things.

• Cool CSS effect to try out: Glitch

Don't be selfish. 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 my courses below or see all ZTM courses here.