[October 2023] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

64th issue! If you missed them, you can read the previous issues of our Web Developer Monthly newsletter here.

Web Developer Monthly Newsletter - October 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 October 2023 as a Web Developer…

Fluid Simulation ⛲️

Some people just amaze me with their creativity. This is a great project to check out, and even play with since it includes an embedded codepen.

In this tutorial, you will build a fluid simulation step by step. Let's see what you can come up with!

React News 💎

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

Is memoization useful? How does it work, and why should we or shouldn't we use it. This is a great breakdown... after you read that, here is another interesting perspective.
NextJS vs Remix which one should you chose for your next big project? Here is a case study.
Server Actions are now in React Canary. If you read my last newsletter and realize how complex and convoluted React is getting, wait until they announce Reverse Proxy Server Components one day 😄.
The 9 best recommendations in the new React docs.

Web Components or React? 🌋

An interesting perspective with this one. Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework.

What do you think?

Unicode Guide 🥸

Before you decide unicode is boring and skip this section, I promise you this article is a lot more interesting than you think and you will learn a thing or two.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023.

Web, the Platform of the Future 🚄

In the 2000s we were used to having to download apps for our specific operating system because you couldn't run things on a web browsers, because they weren't powerful enough.

Photoshop for example? No way you can ever run a powerful software like that on the web.... oh wait, now you can.

If you're a web developer, you know that you can now build everything you want on the web to access every single user with an internet connection.

Why would you ever build an OS specific app... right?

Using AI to build my first bot 🚀

A fun weekend project idea. This person is not a programmer but was able to build a Slack Bot that uses Google LLMs to provide daily channel summaries.

Follow the steps of how people can use AI tools to accelerate their projects.

Now imagine if you're a programmer... how much more powerful can you be?

Speeding Up JavaScript 🏋️

This has been a great series and I recommend you read all the posts inside here, but for now, here is the latest of the series: The barrel file debacle.

Many projects are littered with files that just re-export other files. These so called "barrel files" are one of the key reasons why JavaScript tooling is slow in bigger projects... this shows you how to fix that.

JavaScript Diet 🥦

Solid.js creator Ryan Carniato thinks it's time to put JavaScript code on a diet.

Here's how he recommends trimming it down to size.

Node.js 21 is now Available 🍸

Everyone's favourite JavaScript runtime has entered the legal drinking age in the U.S.

Highlights include updates of the V8 JavaScript engine to 11.8, stable fetch and WebStreams, a new experimental flag to flip module defaults (--experimental-default-type), a built-in WebSocket client, many updates to our test runner, and more.

Check them all out here.

Advice For You 🎎

Advice to people studying technology:

Never just follow hype or trends.
Be curious. Don't just learn tools, try to understand how the underlying technology works.
If possible, try at least once to manually do what e.g. a configuration tool does for you.
If possible, try to look at the code for the tool. Even a basic understanding of the code can be very valuable.
Stay curious. Keep learning. Experiment. Dive deeper into the technology that interests you. If possible, set up a homelab and use it as a playground for learning and breaking things.
Question everything. Especially things that don't make any sense to you.
Don't just assume that someone else knows better - that's how you quickly turn into a blind follower. Sometimes someone else truly knows better, but don't just assume that to be the case by default. And be brave! Stand by the truth and your convictions even if that makes you feel like you stand alone.

I recommend you read the whole article that inspired this: We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak

ZTM 2024 Updates 🔥

If you're new here, at ZTM we want to be known for ALWAYS up to date courses (60+ now!).

So in addition to smaller updates that we're constantly making throughout the year, we also do a massive round of updates that get released around October/November each year.

Our instructors spend 1-2 months updating their courses to be 2024-ready.

If you're a ZTM student, we have already started to announce these updates in our Discord channel and for all of November you will be able to find all of the updated information about the courses and lectures in the temporary channel #2024-updates.

Go check that out now! We have over 300 updated lectures/videos 🤯.

CTO Handbook 📘

A nice little resource for you to bookmark: The Stratup CTO Handbook - Essential Skills And Best Practices For High Performing Engineering Teams.

If you like this kind of stuff, here is another one: Lessons learned from 2 decades of being a Site Reliability Engineer.

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...

Apexcharts.JS - Interactive JavaScript Charts built on SVG
react-magic-motion - A React.js library that magically animates your components.
Transformers.js 2.7 is out! - State-of-the-art Machine Learning for the web. Run Transformers directly in your browser, with no need for a server!
Yarn 4.0 is out - still less popular than npm.
NextJS 14 is out!

News Around the World 🗺

23andMe had a data leak... there goes your DNA information to the world.

Big Tech News 🏢

Remember the Unity debacle in last month's newsletter where greedy choices by the company made every single developer hate Unity? After that bad decision, the CEO has stepped down.
AI Hype is still around, but it's starting to settle. Turns out, Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits... Microsoft, Google and others are experimenting with how to produce, market and charge for new tools and they are struggling so far.
Related to the point above, ChatGPT’s consumer business has been growing more slowly than you might have thought
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a personal computer. If you want some context on the history of Apple CPU Architecture and learn how CPUs work, this is a great read.
Technically not news about a big tech company, but a company that is taking on the big tech and where they are the most profitable: the Cloud. Oxide seems to be a really cool company. As one user states:

*They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it.

It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source.

So no "sorry but the third party vendor dropped support for the bios". You get the source code. Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch.* Keep an eye out on them.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Where does your computer get the time from? A simple sounding problem turns out to be not that simple.
A 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire. So pretty.
Animated AI
How to approach unconventional problems? Creative thinking is key.
You think you had a bad day?

Best Resource of the Month ✅

My favourite types of articles and resources are architecture ones.

Why?

Because architecture is such a fluid topic that is never black and white.

Every problem needs a specific architecture, that might be good or bad depending on the business needs.

More than anything in tech, architectural decisions are almost never the same accross products, and in order to do it right, someone with a lot of experience and knowledge needs to implement it while considering an unimaginable number of factors.

So when this article came up this month, I couldn't NOT give it the Best Resource of the Month award.

Although it simplifies some things, I guarantee you that anyone that reads this article will learn something and become a better programmer for it.

Enjoy it: Deep dive into the problems video streaming sites face and how they can architect their infrastructure to manage the load.

Trick of the Month 🌗

This blew my mind. It's still in beta, but worth checking out...Build browser agents for real world tasks.
A free and open source map of the word that you can use in your projects: Protomaps

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.