Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

40th 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 October 2021 as a Web Developer…

JavaScript Quiz 📝

I'm not going to lie to you. This quiz is extremely frustrating and doesn't actually try to do anything other than trick you and confuse you because of all the JavaScript "weirdness". However, it's still a fun quiz to take. Hint: pick all the unexpected answers to get the right answers. If you get more than 50% on this quiz, you're Brendan Eich.

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. Open source 3D icons for your website
2. Website design inspirations
3. Remove anything you want from pictures with this
4. Become a Box Shadow master not a Shadow Box master

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 39 of the previous issues of this newsletter. That's a joke. Don't do that!

A New Animation Library Appears 👀

This is really cool. A new animation library, built on the Web Animations API for the smallest file size and the fastest performance. It looks super easy to use and the documentation website is on point. Use this for your next project.

React News 💎

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

• While we wait for React 18 to come out, it's a good time to pause and see all the big changes coming. This is my favourite article so far on these upcoming changes.

• Do you ever say to yourself... "My React App is Slow and I Don't Know Why..." Then you should read this short article.

• Making a website or web app accessible improves the user experience for people with disabilities and for all users as well. Here is how to do it right: React Accessibility Tools – How to Build More Accessible React Apps

• Here are some of the antipatterns most commonly seen in React applications and how to fix them. These antipatterns will make your codebase a nightmare to work with if you don’t learn to recognize and prevent them at their early stages.

• Philosophies of React. Or at least, a developer's philosophy when it comes to writing and reviewing React code.

• If you are a React developer, this is a great VS Code extension.

• React & TypeScript: how to type hooks (a complete guide)

• Funding in the JavaScript ecosystem is at an all time high. Here is another one: Remix. Super secret, framework that lets you build better websites.

• Oh, and finally, the React team is working on a new version of their docs that are Hooks centric instead of starting with Classes. Still a work in progress.

Trust Me. Just Read This 🔥

This is just simply gold. You need to read this article this month to just understand how you can be a curious and smart programmer. If this doesn't inspire you to be curious, I don't know what will.

accent-color 🌈

We have already covered this neat little CSS trick in last month's newsletter... but in this article, you will learn how to use its power to make your forms stand out. Really enjoyed this one.

Question of the Week 🔮

Can you safely preview a short link?? If someone sent you a link that is shortened, how can you trust where it will take you? How can you preview it without going to a malicious website? Think about what you may be able to do... Once you have an idea, check out the answer. It's super interesting.

ESBuild: The Future 🪐

Have you heard of ESBuild by now? Get ready to feel bad about yourself: "Work on esbuild started at the start of 2020. It is primarily authored and maintained by Evan Wallace, who, in addition to making this tremendous contribution to the JavaScript ecosystem, is the CTO and co-founder of Figma"... makes that To Do app you build not seem that impressive right? Anyway, here is an interesting discussion about ESBuild and why it is so much faster than all the other build tools in the JS ecosystem.

Adventuron Gamer 🧝‍♂️

This is pretty neat. Adeventuron Classroom allows you to create text based adventure games using just basic browser technologies.

CORS Issues 🐚

Having CORS error in your browser console is a right of passage for any Web Developer... Just like this right of passage: telling someone this new library that just came out is a game changer because you saw a blog post about how it's a game changer, didn't actually read it, but the title said so.

Anywaaaay. Here is the best article I have read on the topic of CORS and everything you ever wanted to know (and hopefully never encounter the error again).

All About Cookies 🍪

Cookies are so 2020... well not really, they are still around. So in this excellent article, find out everything a JavaScript developer needs to know about browser cookies. Check it out.

Spoiler: Deno Is Still a Thing 🦕

Deno was officially released about 1 year ago. Has it killed off NodeJS yet? Here is a status update of everything that happened in Deno land.

The Big JavaScript Lie 🤥

JavaScript has been carrying a stigma of being 'slow' for many years now. Early implementations were slow (particularly in the Internet Explorer era). Google Chrome, having been a powerhouse of performance upon release in 2008, has dramatically increased its performance again over the last 13 years. This stigma of JavaScript being slow is no longer true... have we been lied to? Read on.

Jamming to JAMStack 🐝

3 big things happened in the JAMStack world this month:

1. JAMStack conference happened: Here are all the talks.

2. NextJS conference happened where they announced NextJS v12.

3. ZTM launched its newest course: Complete NexJS Developer in 2022: Zero to Mastery. It's pretty damn good if I say so myself.

Good times in JAMStack land.

.Net... More like Dot NOoo ☠️

If you're into internet drama, which is pretty much everywhere on the internet now, then why not some programming drama? In the .Net world there was a big kerfuffle between some of the open source maintainers and members of the Windows team. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the drama. If you just want an overview of what happened, here it is.

Weekend Project Ideas 🧰

Check this out to see a description of a task and try to build these mini projects yourself using plain HTML, CSS and JS. 7 Graphical User Interfaces is a programming benchmark to compare implementations in terms of their notation. 7GUIs defines 7 tasks that represent typical challenges in GUI programming. This site implements the 7 tasks using vanilla HTML, CSS & JavaScript... can you do it as well?

Is the Future, Web Streams? 🚿

There are three kinds of streams: readable streams, writable streams, and transform streams. Readable streams are where the chunks of data come from. The underlying data sources could be a file or HTTP connection, for example. Streams are and will become a more important part of the web, so read this to get caught up on what they are and what you can do with streams.

Does Anyone use WeakMap()? 🦩

I had this question too... when will I ever be using this new JavaScript feature. Seems useless right? Well in this article the author gives you one use case where you may want to use it (and why it was introduced to the JavaScript language for a reason).

Public Service Announcement 🎙

Stop using Google search, and instead use Brave search.. trust me... your personal privacy will be thanking you. Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser

136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling 👘

I had to add this here simply for the great title. Enjoy the article.

Vue Interview Questions 🎯

Do you love Vue? Do you think you know it all? Try out these common Vue interview questions to test your level of understanding. They are petty good.

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:

• Parcel version 2 is here gang!. The less complicated Webpack as I like to call it.

• Google just launched its own Developer Library. Dev Library as a platform showcases blog posts and open source tools with easy-to-use navigation for these product areas (mostly Google related): Machine Learning, Flutter, Firebase, Angular, Cloud, and Android.

• React Native 0.66 is coming!

• Read about all the new things in Gatsby v4!

News Around the World 🗺

• NPM package ua-parser-js with more than 7M weekly download is compromised. Check your node_modules folder.

• Biggest shocker of the month (sarcasm): Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners.

Big Tech News 🏢

• The entirety of Twitch has been leaked... including source code and user payout data. All in a 128gb torrent. Not a good month for Twitch.

• Apple came out with new laptops... but the big news is the Apple built CPUs: M1 Pro or M1 Max chips that blow any competition out of the water. Insane results at the always expected high prices. Apple is doing well.

• Facebook is turning into Meta ✌️

• Google has an anti-trust lawsuit on its way. Remember how we all said AMP is the worst? Here is part of the lawsuit: 249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. UGh. Here is a twitter thread of all the bad things they are doing.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• The very first artwork made in space... a great story too.

• We live in a beautiful world. Moths in slow motion.

• This is probably the coolest project I have EVER seen.

• Programmers, get your brain turned into mush.

• The impossible camera shot.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

This is a good one....

You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context.

“You just need to charge more!” says the company who has been in business for 20 years and spent years charging “too little” to gain customers and become successful.

“You need to build everything as microservices!” says the company who built a quick monolith, gained thousands of customers, and then pivoted into microservices as they started running into scaling issues.

Without understanding the context, the advice is meaningless, or even worse, harmful. If those folks had followed their own advice early on, they themselves would likely have suffered from it. It is hard to escape this trap. We may be the culmination of our experiences, but we view them through the lens of the present.

Keep reading my favourite article of the month: 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• Motion Design Editor for the Web... or you know just take our motion design course with Figma.

• Favicon.js to make all the coolest favicon notifications

• Love cricket? Well, then: fake VS Code to browse live cricket score in office

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.