16th issue! If you missed the last few months, check them all out 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 thing that is hard, however, is staying up to date with the constantly evolving ecosystem. You want to be a top performing web developer, coder, programer, software developer, but you don’t have time to select from hundreds of articles, videos and podcasts each day.
This monthly newsletter is focused on keeping you up to date with the industry, keeping your skills sharp, without wasting your valuable time. I will be sharing the most important articles, 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?
What you missed in October as a Web Developer…
Git Branches Everywhere 🌲🌳
Ever get confused by how git branching works, and what a proper workflow should look like? Don’t lie, we all have had a tough time learning about this. Luckily, there is now a fun interactive tool for you to learn without destroying everyone’s day at work by ruining everything with your merge. Finally, here is a little git cheat sheet for you.
Free Tools For Web Developers ✂️
Some tools and assets to help you build your next project since we are best friends by now (unless this is your first time reading my articles… in that case let’s take things slow):
- My favourite illustration library in a long time
- Find the screen sizes needed for your next project (hint: there are a lot)
- If you’re not sick and tired already of free illustrations: Here is another one. And another one. Ok, one last one.
- Use physical mockups instead of digital ones
- Unsubscribe from all unwanted emails… but not this one because, you know, we like each other.
- 200 free icons for you!
- List of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.
React News 💎
It’s a big one this month. What crazy things have they been up to?
- Concurrent Mode (experimental) is finally here. A great writeup on how it works.
- 100% agree with this blog post. Stop looking at all the shiny things, and learn Redux because it teaches really good design principles and will make you a better developer.
- Forms with React just got simpler with React Hook Form. Make sure you scroll to the bottom to see code comparison with the alternatives. Really neat!
- Ionic React just came out! Wait, isn’t the whole point of Ionic to use Angular instead of React? Well, it was.. not anymore. Read their announcement to learn why they built it.
- Next.js now has their own version of create react app. Guess the name: create next app. Shocker.
- John Carmack* (he’s famous, google him)* just said that React is a bigger win for VR than Unity.
- Finally, here is one of the best React project generators I have ever seen.
Design Quick Tips 🎨
Ok, this is from 2017, but I just saw this now so it still counts. A great twitter thread showing some quick design tips to make your next web project look a little nicer.
Finally, learn how to implement a design system on your project with this great guide.
Ok, I lied… one more: here is a video series on how to do Layout with CSS Grid and Subgrids.
Who Cares About <head>? 🗿
It’s usually an afterthought, but when was the last time you audited what is in your <head> tag on your page? I guarantee you will learn something new in this free guide to improve what is added in your <head> tag. Enjoy!
Vue 3 is Happening 👩🏻🔬 👨🏻🔬
VueJS is growing up fast. Here is what to expect next and the alpha version if you want to experiment. You can read up on what this version of Vue (Vue 3) has that will make it much better than before.
JSON.stringify() Tricks 🧶
I didn’t know you could do half of these things with JSON.stringify() until this post. Pretty fun read. You probably will never use this knowledge in your day to day, but imagine the possibilities now impressing your programmer friends.
Monorepo vs Multirepo 🧱
Read the first half of this blog post for a nice quick overview of the pros and cons of each strategy.
Why Accessibility is Important 👓
No, this isn’t another post on how to do something that you know you should, but you probably wont. Instead, this is the supreme court saying: *Hey you should probably make your website with Accessibility in mind otherwise you are in trouble. *Learn how to do that here.
Node.js 13 is Here and Node.js 12 is LTS 🛎
The title is literally all I have to say about this, but for the sake of making this chunk of text look like a paragraph one thing I want to note: The Node.js 13 release replaces version 12 in the release line. But 13 release won’t be promoted to LTS (Long Term Support) so they don’t recommend it for production. Wow, this turned out to be a nice little writeup in the end!
Data Industry is Big. How big? 🌅
You know how everybody wants to be a Data Scientist now? Well, good luck keeping up with everything. This is still a young (kind of) and fast growing industry with a lot to go through (Yes this is a monthly for web developers, but it’s still important, so check it out).
HTML Mistake Can Cost You Money 💸
I absolutely love write-ups like these. You don’t need to be a master security expert to find vulnerabilities online. This individual just used basic knowledge about the web to realize that Chipotle had an HTML attribute incorrectly set that potentially cost them a lot of money. Must read.
While we are on the topic, here is a similar article showing how to take advantage of your newfound skills with Chrome Developer Tools.
Around the World 🗺️
- The trendy thing to do by governments when there is civil unrest and protests? Shut down social media platforms. Iraq just did that, followed by just shutting down the internet.
- US executive order means that developers in Venezuela are no longer allowed to use Adobe line of products.
- Remember the Equifax data breach? Guess what the username and password to access this information was?
- Indian startup scene is growing like crazy. Keep an eye on this.
Big Tech News 🏢
- A whole big section on Facebook this month as they were very busy doing things. They may have to provide backdoors to the UK government (with WhatsApp?). Governments also said to Facebook: “pretty please don’t work on end to end encryption because bad people will be able to communicate mmmk?”. Paypal withdrew from their Libra cryptocurrency. Then Ebay, Visa and Mastercard did the same thing. Oh and they decided Facebook News would be a good idea with all the excellent press they are getting.
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WeWork may have been a bad investment for SoftBank. They cancelled their planned IPO this month.
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Microsoft announced Windows 10x for dual screen devices. They also have their own earbuds, and a new surface laptop. They also lost an appeal meaning that they don’t have the right to prevent people from scraping LinkedIn data for public profiles. This has big implications for people web scraping. They also just won a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon. Amazon may have lost because Trump doesn’t like Bezos.
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Apple’s new MacOS Catalina update broke a bunch of applications since they finally dropped 32 bit support. They also announced AirPods Pro.
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Google also had their Pixel 4 event and announced a ton of new things. They also may purchase FitBit soon (Update: it happened). But the biggest thing is that they released a paper that confirms “quantum supremacy”. It’s a huge advancement in Computer Science. This is the official announcement (99% is above my pay grade).
Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃
This is just so cool! Check out the most popular programming languages throughout history… guess who’s at the top now? I’ve watched this 5 times now. Don’t judge.
Best Resource of the Month ✅
We constantly hear that shared mutable state (data) is bad practice. But can you explain why? This blog post attempts to help you understand why we would want to avoid such type of state, and what we can do to solve it in JavaScript.
Trick of the Month 🌗
Fun way to create hand drawn interactive charts with JavaScript! Also, here is a way to find out if a website has vulnerabilities in its frontend JavaScript libraries.
By the way, my full time job is to teach people to code 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 of my courses by visiting the courses page.
