[November 2023] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

65th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter - November 2023

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 November 2023 as a Web Developer…

The Most Impressive Thing 🦜

A lot happened this month, but nothing was as impressive as this tweet.

Sure, there is a lot of hype, and there is still so much more room to grow, but doing something like this a few months ago was virtually impossible without a lot of resources and time.

Times are changing...

React News 💎

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

Vite is available in Remix v2.2.0! Now you get all the benefits of Vite, inside Remix. Oh, and ZTM just released it's Remix Bootcamp course.. a course that took almost a year to make.. crazy I know, but it's that good. Might be the best out there... with a dash of bias.
As React UI controls become more sophisticated, complex logic can get intertwined with the visual representation. This makes it hard to reason about the behavior of the component, hard to test it, and necessary to build similar components that need a different look. Enter the Headless Component.

OpenAI DevDay 🌋

A lot of OpenAI news this month. The hot topic is the CEO, Sam Altman, was pushed out by the board of directors and there is a lot of speculation around why this happened...

Oh and then he got rehired and is back as if nothing happened.

However, here at ZTM, we don't care about online drama. The more interesting part was that OpenAI had their first DevDay.

If you are a dev and want to get into a very young space with high potential, you should keep an eye on this.

New models and developer products were announced at DevDay that are quite impressive. My favourite: Custom GPTs.

While we are on this topic, here is a good article on how to "build AI products".

The synopsis: don't do the easy things that everyone can copy.

Weekend Project Idea 🐟

Wow. Check out this project, clone it from GitHub, and start playing with it.

It's a great example of how to use Sockets in Node. This may be one of my favourite projects of the year. Customize it to your liking, and share with us what you end up creating!

State Of JS 🏆

The annual state of JS survey is out. It's one of the most popular surveys in the Web Development world.

Now that ZTM is officially a "big" school, I think it's time we leave our mark on this survey.

Take the survey here (you don't need to signup) and when you get to the RESOURCES category (2nd last section)... it will ask you "Which paid resources (courses, videos, books, etc) have you used to learn?"

When you get there, feel free to add:

👉 Zero to Mastery

Anybody that does this gets good karma for life and will really make our day... seriously 🙂

The Angular Comeback 🛡

Angular v17 was just announced.

With all of the React drama happening lately, is Angular making a comeback? It reminds me of the story of the rabbit and the hare.

React grows fast, hype, new tools, changes, spotlight, while Angular just churns away slowly on key features and creates a very stable and steady moving framework.

I'm definitely noticing a lot less negativity around Angular these last few months compared to past years.

Manipulate That DOM 👾

Whether you're developing or using a component in any framework, you need to work with the DOM at a certain level to make anything interactive on a website.

Knowing the browser DOM APIs and how to use them is crucial to web development.

This person just compiled an epic list of resources for you.

Browser Debugging Tricks 🚀

67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn't Want You to Know.

With a title like that, I dare you not to click and find out. A list of useful, not-obvious hacks to get the most out of your browser’s debugger. It assumes an intermediate-level-or-higher understanding of the developer tools.

Web Components Again 🎹

Web Components has been trying to be a thing for a long time and it doesn't seem to be catching on. However, this is still a good article worth reading to keep you in the loop.

JavaScript Diet 🥦

JavaScript can be a little overweight sometimes. Here is a great talk that every JavaScript developer should watch from last month - The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript.

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 14 was recently released. Let's hope it's not as much of a disaster as the 13 release. One comment from hackernews:

My ongoing concern with Next is the Vercel's team unresponsiveness to page-breaking bugs coming off of features marked "stable" and in the docs. Lately, it seems like most issues aren't even being acknowledged.

It's pretty frustrating to encounter a bug in a documented use case, spend hours trying to fix it, realize it's a Next issue that was filed months ago but has yet to receive a response from Vercel, or to have reproduced and explained the issue and be ignored for months and counting.

Prettier 3.1 is out!
Vite 5.0 is out - definitely gaining more and more traction.

News Around the World 🗺

Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Steps Down, Pleads Guilty - Largest global crypto exchange will admit wrongdoing and agree to pay $4.3 billion in fines. Crypto doing crypto things as usual.

Big Tech News 🏢

WeWork goes bankrupt. It was a long time coming and they join the long list of overhyped billion dollar startups that were able to market better than they were able to provide a profitable product.
Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal. This is super interesting because it used to be secret information before it got leaked this month.
GitHub’s AI coding assistant, Copilot, has gone from an experiment to a moneymaker, the company’s CEO Thomas Dohmke said. Surprising news considering most AI products right now are losing money. OH! Guess what!? ZTM already has a course on using Github Copilot to upskill and increase your productivity...check it out here.

Speaking of Copilot...

We just launched a new masterclass style course that teaches you all about GitHub Copilot and how to use it to write code faster and more efficiently.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

A question we have all wondered... How did the jungle gym start? We've all asked that right? RIGHT?!
Stable Video Diffusion foundation model for generative video based on the image model Stable Diffusion. Very very cool.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

"Imagine a world where every software developer is just a coder. In such a world, code might get written, but would it solve any problems?

Would the code be even useful or just an implementation of something fancy?

The difference between a developer and a great developer is the breadth and depth of their approach in delivering value."

What makes a great software developer? What are the habits of highly effective developers?

Find out here. I think Vadim provides some really good advice that all of you will enjoy.

Trick of the Month 🌗

ChatGPT voice is a thing now, and I've heard of some people using it as a podcast to ask it questions, and listen to the answers while they learn. Cool trick!
How to have a secure browser, and the ongoing saga with uBlock Origin plugin.
Create really cool CSS Animations with no code.

Thanks for reading!

Don't be shy now... 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 our popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.