[September 2022] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

51st 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 September 2022 as a Web Developer…

Let My JavaScript Go 👊

Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark. Did you know that the JavaScript trademark is owned by Oracle? Ryan Dahl, the brains behind NodeJS and Deno, is asking to pretty please release it. I'm pretty sure what Oracle's response is....

2 more things for you to check out:

A little history lesson on JavaScript.
Speaking of JavaScript legacy, check out this Q&A with Douglas Crockford who played a critical role in the growth of JavaScript.

CSR vs SSG vs SSR ☘️

CSR: Client-side Rendering SSR: Server-side Rendering SSG: Static Site Generation

The battle of the acronyms! Which one wins? This is a nice break down of each of the 3 ways to render apps on the web.

React News 💎

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

Preact introduced Signals: a way of expressing state that ensure apps stay fast regardless of how complex they get. Signals are based on reactive principles and provide excellent developer ergonomics, with a unique implementation optimized for Virtual DOM.
Why every React Developer should learn Function Composition.
React, I love you but you are bringing me down.
A spicy post that made the round this month in the React circles: Get in Zoomer, We're Saving React

This Is How To Get Hired 🦤

If you're looking for a cool project idea, check this out: Building an aircraft radar system in JavaScript. These are the kind of projects that I like to call "Job Getters" (need to find a cooler name).

A project like this not only makes you extremely interesting to interviewers, but also gives you a chance to spend most of the interview talking about the project instead of being asked questions you have no idea how to answer.

In case you missed it, we recently put together an absolutely epic Ace The Coding Interview guide. This will also help you get hired.

Why Storybook in 2022 💫

A case for why you should use Storybook to build your frontend components. What do you think?

NodeJS Architecture 🌵

A fun and free read about Node architecture, APIs, event loop, concurrency right here... or you can just take the ZTM NodeJS course. Up to you!

Secret JavaScript APIs 🌚

Ok, maybe not secret, but least known yet extremely useful APIs, such as the Page Visibility API, Web Sharing API, Broadcast Channel API and Internationalization API. Check out what they are and how to use them.

Backend For Frontend 👹

An interesting concept. Worth a read. Too lazy to write anymore than that :).

A Discussion You Should Read ⚔️

I think all of us as programmers have thought about this: Generalists vs Specialists. Do you regret being a generalist? I recommend reading this fascinating discussion on Hackernews.

Cache your CORS 🧑🏾‍🎤

I'm adding this here just because I wanted to have this title. Great name for a music band. Enjoy.

Good Boy NPM 🪅

In this tutorial, go step by step through creating an npm package using modern best practices. You will first learn how to create an npm package, then you’ll learn what’s involved with making a more robust and production-ready npm package. See if you can publish your first NPM package this month!

Stable Diffusion on the Web 🪆

Want to build a cool website like this? The author shared their code... super cool:

From the author:

The videos are generated from random https://lexica.art prompts, with linear interpolation between two random seeds for each video, held at the same prompt, looped with ffmpeg filter_complex reverse/concat. Music from various creative commons / free sources. Hosted on a single $7 node at https://www.digitalocean.com

Source code at https://github.com/lwneal/duckrabbit/

Avoiding Homework With Code 👨‍🏫

A fun story to get your creative code juices flowing.

JavaScript in 2022 🦾

The HTTP Archive did an overview of JavaScript in 2022. A long but interesting read that gives you some great insights. Sit back, grab a coffee and spend some time with this one.

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...

React Native 0.70 is out! Will they have the record for the longest running project without a v1?!
MemLab: An open source framework for finding JavaScript memory leaks. From Facebook... oops I mean META.
GitHub's largest open-source algorithm library: The Algorithms.

News Around the World 🗺

The founder of Patagonia is giving his company away to help fight climate change. I highly recommend reading his book Let My People Surf.
The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-Biggest Blockchain.
Proof that you can still make apps as a single developer that are popular. A 63-year-old man in Japan who is an avid iPhone user has dedicated some of his post-retirement years to developing a popular, unique app that displays two calculators on one screen.

Big Tech News 🏢

TikTok U.S.A has been breached. Goodbye your data. If this shocks you, you haven't been paying attention to the news the last few years.
The fall event from Apple brought new iPhone 14 models, new AirPods and lots more... check out the important parts here.
Replit which we use heavily in our ZTM courses has a big announcement similar to Github Copilot. Is this the future?: Today, we're announcing AI Mode, which infuses state-of-the-art intelligence into nearly all IDE features. AI Mode sports an ML-powered pair programmer that completes your code in realtime, tools to generate, transform, and explain code, and an in-editor search utility that lets you find and import open-source code without leaving your editor (think Stackoverflow in your editor).
Adobe has acquired Figma for $20 billion. This is the biggest SaaS acquisition ever. A signal that Adobe realized they cannot compete with Figma. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Adobe is smart enough to not lose the design battle again (or not?).
Open AI has released Whisper... that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.
Google is shutting down Stadia

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Drone over Everest. Pretty impressive.
Stable Diffusion has been the talk of the town in the Machine Learning world the last few months. Here is a cool website that lets you play around with this impressive algorithm. Here is another fun library to play with.
A reminder to have a little humility.
Welcome to Bitburner, a cyberpunk-themed incremental RPG! The game takes place in a dark, dystopian future... The year is 2077...
TDungeon is a small adventure game that runs in the Typescript type system. Umm.. WHAT!?
New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades.
A hilarious read about our Calendar

Best Resource of the Month ✅

Is it too late to start programming? Am I too old? I'm surprised at how many times I get this question. The answer is always that it's never too late (I think the oldest ZTM student we have is in their 80s!).

I wanted to share these two resources this month that will not only give you advice from programmers with experience, but it also proves the point that it is never too late to get started:

Trick of the Month 🌗

Seamlessly visualize your JSON data instantly into graphs
A programming font based on the typeface used in Minecraft

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.