[October 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 88th 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 2025 as a Web Developer…

Pareto CSS 💅🏻

What's the least amount of CSS you need for a decent looking site? Someone explored this question, and I do love the simplicity of it all. Everything in our industry is constantly changing but there is one rule that never changes: simplicity over complexity.

Vite Doc 🐦‍🔥

Can you get nerdier than a documentary about a build tool? Enjoy the story of Vite and learn about its history. It's pretty good.

P.S. Vite 4.0 is out!

AI Bubble 🍾

I usually don't include youtube videos in this newsletter but this one is worth a watch (yes I realize the last link was about a Vite Doc, stop nitpicking): The state of the AI industry and why we should be very very worried. The graph shown in this video is actually crazy pills.

React News 💎

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

Learn how to manage state in modern React apps: React State Management in 2025: What You Actually Need.
React 19.2 is out! And finally React Compiler v1 is out as well!
Big news out of React is that it's moving away from Meta ownership: "we are announcing our plans to move React and React Native from Meta to a new React Foundation. As a part of this change, we will also be implementing a new independent technical governance structure. We believe these changes will enable us to give React ecosystem projects more resources." See the full announcement here.
A lot of announcements from React world this month since they just had their annual conference. So here is a recap if you care.

HTML's Best Kept Secret 🥢

Every developer knows <input>. It’s the workhorse of the web.

But <output>? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists. Can you guess what it does?

Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex 🥋

This person scraped hundreds of Reddit comments that compare Claude Code and Codex, and used Claude Haiku to build a sentiment analysis dashboard. Check out the results here. TLDR: we are all cheap and just care about the price.

Ps, fun thing from this month, you can now use Claude Code inside your web browser.

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...

ChatKit - framework for building high-quality, AI-powered chat experiences.
React Native 0.82 is out! This one runs entirely on their new architecture.
Bun 1.3 is here, the new trendy JavaScript runtime.
NodeJS 25.0.0 is here with a major JSON.stringify performance improvement.
NextJS v16 is out, but I have too much NextJS fatigue to even care.

News Around the World 🗺

Big oopsie in South Korea: fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available...
On October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

I have to start this section with the worst idea of the month, and possibly the worst idea of the year award (although tough to beat anything created by Meta): OpenAI Atlas - have you ever wanted to have OpenAI see your entire search history and all the things you look up online and feed it into ChatGPT? Well, that's what you can do with Atlas.
OpenAI released some business numbers: $4.3b in income, $13.5b in loss. I like this take from a commenter:

I think people are massively underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future. They generated $4.3B in revenue without any advertising program to monetise their 700 million weekly active users, most of whom use the free product.

Google earns essentially all of its revenue from ads, $264B in 2024. ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point, and numerous ways of inserting sponsored results, which they’re starting to experiment with with the recent announcement of direct checkout.

The biggest concern IMO is how good the open weight models coming out of China are, on consumer hardware. But as long as OpenAI remains the go-to for the average consumer, they’ll be fine.

OpenAI also announced Apps and Apps SDK... a way for developers to create apps you can chat with right inside ChatGPT. They also announced AgentKit which give you new tools for building, deploying, and optimizing agents.
Qualcomm is buying Arduino.
Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 4.5. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model. Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.
Another Anthropic announcement: Claude Skills, essentially Skills are folders and files with text that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed, ideally written by you and the "instructor".
Big news out of Apple: the M5 chip is coming: M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4, featuring a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, a more powerful CPU, a faster Neural Engine, and higher unified memory bandwidth. Apple chip is pretty much dominating the personal computer space right now.
AWS had a major outage this month that resulted in a lot of services being down (including ZTM), but the good news is that a lot of great memes came out of it. Here is what happened.
Nvidia is on a path to become the first 5 trillion dollar company. Since they have so much money to spend, they just bought Nokia for $1 billion this month.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Cool fluid glass website.
This month we found out that LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji.
Live stream from Namib desert. I can watch this for hours.
Space Elevator, the coolest website of the month.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

It's very rare that a bug report makes the best resource of the month section, but this is too good not to share. Hacking Formula 1: Accessing Max Verstappen's passport and PII through FIA bugs.

The reason I loved this, is that it's so... eays, and it also teaches you some simple ways you can check for bugs inside websites yourself. I guarantee you will learn something or two from this writeup.

Trick of the Month 🌗

How a hacker should watch baseball. From the terminal. Go Jays!

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.