Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Andrei Neagoie
Andrei Neagoie
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Welcome to the 76th issue of Web Developer Monthly!

If it’s your first time here, welcome, I like you already. If you want the full back story on the newsletter, head here.

The quick version: I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos from the world of web and software development.

Think the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the programming world. I give you the 20% that will get you 80% of the results.

If you're a long time reader, welcome back old friend.

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what you missed in October 2024 as a Web Developer…

10+ ECMAScript Proposals 🗼

TC39 met this month in Tokyo (how nice) and they have approved nearly a dozen proposals to advance to the next stages with potential of these features being added to the JavaScript language.

Here is the recap of this event and some of the key features to watch out for.

Here is also a discussion around a controversial proposal: JavaScript Structs.

Do AI Companies Work? 🤖

There is no doubt there is a flood of AI tools out right now... but does AI work? This is a good thought experiment.

"In this market, timing may be everything: At some point, the hype will die down, and people won’t be able to raise these sorts of rounds. And the winners won’t be who ran the fastest or reached some finish line, but whoever was leading when the market decided the race is over."

React News 💎

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

  1. Here is a list of all the types of React components. Before you click, how many components do you think React has as its building blocks? I bet you can't think of them all.

  2. Guess what!? There is another new React framework: One - One is a new React framework for web and native, built on Vite. It simplifies things with universal, typed routing seamlessly across static, server, and client pages. Plus, an amazing new solution to data... don't they all?

  3. Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components... speaking of, Microsoft's Edge browser team is on a mission to swap out React UI components with native web platform components.

  4. Organizing large React applications into folders and files is a topic that often sparks strong opinions. Here is a 5 step approach on how to do it right.

GPU Bubble is Bursting 🎈

This is a fascinating read that I recommend everyone check out. It was almost the Best Resource of the Month. Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them. Today, there's 7 different resale markets selling them under $2. What happened?

Here is how the GPU market burst and what the effects will be for the entire AI market.

Valuable warnings in this article.

15 Year Old is Better than You 👀

A 15 year old discovered a bug that affected over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Here is their story. Try not to feel bad about how much better this teenager is than you.

Breaking setTimeout 🦾

This was a very fun read. Do you know you can break setTimeout if you run it for 25 days? Can you guess why that is?

In most JavaScript runtimes, this duration is represented as a 32-bit signed integer. That means the maximum timeout is about 2.1 billion milliseconds, or about 24.9 days. If you try to set a bigger timeout, weird things happen.

More HTML Forms 💅

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused... and I tend to agree with this statement. Too often, we look for custom javascript solutions, but why bother when it's already built into native HTML that works across all browsers, and have great mobile compatibility (like keyboard slide-up)?

Here is a look at how you can use more HTML forms in your projects.

Flutter is Getting Forked 🍴

Because Flutter is a front end tool (even though it's mostly for mobile), we have to report on it. There is some forking going on, so if you use Flutter, keep an eye out on things.

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...

  • Tauri 2.0 is out! Think of it as a less popular Electron for building desktop apps.

  • Vue creator is starting a new company: VoidZero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. They have raised a cool $4.6 million in seed funding.

  • ESLint now officially supports linting of JSON and Markdown... this is actually great news!

  • Deno 2.0 is out! My favourite JavaScript runtime!

  • Node v23.0 is out! The big news? Support for loading native ES modules using require() had been available on v20.x and v22.x under the command line flag --experimental-require-module. In v23.x, this feature is now enabled by default.

  • Civet - a superset of TypeScript. Apparently people want this?

  • Svelte 5 is here - still the little baby of the frontend world.

  • NextJS 15 is also out - another update.

News Around the World 🗺

  • This is an incredible historical event for humanity, and it's straight out of a sci-fi movie. Watch Starship's Fifth flight test and successful capture of its rocket. Absolutely wild.

  • The Internet Archive was under attack this month, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts. An account on X called SN_Blackmeta said it was behind the attack... did not expect a place like Internet Archive to ever get targeted.

Big Tech News 🏢

  • Meta released Meta Movie Gen - a new way to generate AI videos, and it's looking impressive. Meta is getting a lot of goodwill from the engineering community these days with all of their open source releases in the AI field.

  • A lot of Anti Trust cases coming out lately in big tech. US antitrust case against Amazon is set to move forward.

  • Google's NotebookML made a lot of splash last month (if you didn't hear about it, maybe you should be reading this newsletter every month you slacker). Now, you can guide NotebookLM's Audio Overview, guiding what the AI hosts focus on and their expertise level, and apply for the NotebookLM Business pilot program... keep an eye on this space.

  • Anthropic is making a lot of waves in the AI tooling world. Their latest? Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and a new model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across-the-board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding—an area where it already led the field. Claude 3.5 Haiku matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, our prior largest model, on many evaluations for the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku. The computer use demo is crazy impressive.

  • Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro with M4 chip, and new iMac with M4, supercharged by Apple Intelligence and available in fresh colors... uh la la, pretty.

  • OpenAI is building its own chips with Broadcom and TSMC wile it scales back foundry ambition. Remember how Sam Altman at one point wanted to build their own foundry with a $7 trillion investment? They also released ChatGPT Search: Get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources.

  • Microsoft’s GitHub has agreed to bake artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and Google into Github Copilot. At first, customers will be able to use Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet to chat and ask questions and eventually, the models will be incorporated into the main part of the GitHub Copilot assistant.

  • This is important so take note: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI. Industry is changing whether you like it or not. If you want to stay current and up to date then...

Shameless plug time...

ZTM is now teaching more AI topics, in more depth, than any other learning platform out there (with lots more in the works)!

So if you want to learn the latest AI skills and be part of this next massive technology wave, ZTM is where you need to be.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

  • Euclid is creating an atlas of the cosmos. Here are its first images that will make you feel very very small.

  • PHP server with electron client to create... Counter Strike: Here is the code.

  • A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

First read this article, and then read an insightful comment and life lesson from hackernews user seanhunter... the lesson will last you a lifetime:

One of the most valuable life lessons is you can't get anyone else to care about what you want them to care about basically ever. You need to focus on the things you can control and one of the things you can't control is what someone else is going to care about.

So if you want something done and someone else has to agree, you have to figure out how the thing you want coincides somehow with their interests and concerns. Then you explain the thing you want to them in terms of how it advances/affects the interests and concerns of the other person.

So in the framing of TFA, product are never ever ever under any circumstances going to give a shit about your architecture proposal (because that is entirely in the domain of your concerns). But they may care about how the architecture is going to prevent them from delivering features that are on the roadmap coming up and how you have a solution that can fix that for example (because now you are in the domain of their concerns).

Notice this is not just "your architecture proposal", it is how your architecture proposal is going to get them what they want, and if you want to do this you need to think deeply and make sure you really understand what they want, not just what you want.

You're not trying to change their mind. You're trying to get what you want by showing them how it will also get them something they want.

I'm putting this here because I really wish someone had told me this 25 years ago near the start of my career.

Trick of the Month 🌗

wow reaction

Generative AI Scripting - Programmatically assemble prompts for LLMs using JavaScript. This is some meta trick for you this month.

Thanks for reading!

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See you next month! ❤️

By the way, I teach people how to code and get hired in the most efficient way possible as an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our most popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.

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