Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

52nd 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 2022 as a Web Developer…

The New Wave 🏄‍♂️

Make sense of the proliferation of new Javascript web frameworks. A deep dive into the problems at scale and the recent evolution of innovation.

If you're a web developer, you have to read this article.

It gives great historical context of where we started with frontend frameworks, and where we are now. Things seem to be more complex than it ever has been. Is this a good thing? Time will tell.

React News 💎

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

• use in React – a new hook is coming

• A detailed post on how React rendering behaves, and how use of Context and React-Redux affect rendering

• This article is a deep dive into the inner workings of selectors, subscribers, preventing re-renders, and more. The examples given will be based on the React ecosystem, but if you’re coming from a different framework, there are lessons to be learned as well: How to write your own state management library

• This article looks at React's current rendering patterns, their problems, and how the new patterns introduced with React 18 aim to fix those problems

• This may be my favourite React trick

<template> Trick 🎭

The <template> HTML element is intended to store HTML that is not yet used. The element itself and all its content are invisible, so it can be basically anywhere in the document without much risk... although you’d typically have your templates at the root level.

Learn how to use this nifty little element.

Are Frameworks Bad? 🥊

This article argues that Frameworks:

• are harming maintainability, but not deliberate.
• have different goals than you or your team.
• make trade-offs that harm maintainability of the projects built in them.
• are designed to take your project hostage.

What do you think? It's worth a read and has some interesting points.

The HTTP Crash Course 🏎

HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone's way.

If you're reading this article, there's a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you're reading this from an RSS reader or something. And you didn't even have to think about it!

But still... the HTTP crash course nobody asked for is worth spending some time on. It's the backbone of our internet as we know it after all...

Watch Out For Node 📡

With Node v19 there is a cool little experimental feature: support for running in ‘watch’ mode using the node --watch option. Running in ‘watch’ mode restarts the process when an imported file is changed.

Goodbye to the popular nodemon package? Check out the details here.

NextJS 13 👹

In an never ending game of keep up with all of these JavaScript frameworks, here is another on in our series of "Super big change that isn't actually that big but we will announce it as big changes to generate hype that this is revolutionary and changes the entire web development process but doesn't".

No I'm not jaded, you are. NextJS 13 is here.

While we are on the topic here is a case study of how one company improved React loading times by 70% with Next.js.

Pokemon + CSS 🐡

This may be the greatest use of CSS to really showcase the power of CSS. Tell me this isn't the prettiest effect you have ever seen on the web. See if you can recreate this project.

If anyone reading this decides to incorporate this into the Robofriends project from our ZTM courses, send me a tweet and let me know and we will feature your projects to all of our students!

JS Tiny Games 🧑🏾‍🎤

The eleventh annual js13kGames coding competition, challenging participants to create games in 13kB or less of JavaScript in a month, just wrapped up.

This post highlights the top thirteen entries. Enjoy feeling inferior to these engineers while you try and figure out why your text is overflowing on a button.

TypeScript's 10 Year Birthday 🪅

10 years ago, on October 1st, 2012, TypeScript was unveiled publicly for the first time. When TypeScript first debuted, there was a lot of skepticism – and understandably so. To some JavaScript users, a team trying to bring static types to JavaScript might have sounded like an evil plot or a joke. Now it's omnipresent.

Here is a look at the growth of TypeScript.

How To Talk and Write Good 📝

Writing and speaking effectively is a superpower, there is no denying it. As a software engineer, you write a lot. Most of the writing you do is for computers. Businesses, however, consist of people. So how do you talk and write well?

This is a valuable lesson to last your full career.

Compiler Inception 👨‍🏫

Can you transpile JavaScript to C++ so you can compile that to whatever needed? Yes... yes you can.

Staff Engineer Archetypes 🚪

An interesting look at a software engineer's career ladder path. For those that aren't sure of what a role promotion might look like, this is a great read. Teach Lead, Architect, Right Hand, Solver.

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...

• Intl Explorer: a tool for experimenting and trying out the ECMAScript Internationalization API.

• Turbopack: Rust-based successor to Webpack... we will see if it actually replaces Webpack.

News Around the World 🗺

• Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong. Yes... the human race is screwed.

• Some lawyers are investigating a potential lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for violating its legal duties to open-source authors and end users. Lots of ethical issues here.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Facebook is laying off thousands of employees apparently. This month was a bad month for the Meta parent company. In better news, they released their latest VR headset this month.

• Toyota Suffered a Data Breach by Accidentally Exposing A Secret Key Publicly On GitHub. Even big companies with lots of engineering power make mistakes.

• The sale of Twitter finally went through.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Google's imagen that generates AI videos. Hover over each video to see the description that generated the video. Super cool

• An interesting photo collection of retro personal computer ads from the 1980s

• Not only is this a cool website, it also shows how much space junk we have

• NASA’s Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation

• A chill driving game with procedurally generate scenic landscapes. Coolest web app ever?

• Go inside the Great Pyramid of Giza for the first time

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Is the future of the web on the Edge? It all started with one computer. A computer that had to be on all the time to be a server. It had a paper note saying NOT to turn it off.

Read this article to understand the history of the web, and then where we are now.

Running a server may no longer be done on a single machine like it was intended initially.

This was the best resource of the month and you cannot miss it.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• AI generated free stock images for your project: wowow

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 my courses below or see all ZTM courses here.