Hot New Web Dev – November 2023

Welcome to Hot Web Dev November 2023, featuring the latest technology and web development news. Bagged yourself a bargain in the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale or fed up with the email inbox being swamped? You are lucky because it’s not been featured in this edition. Instead, we are discussing privacy, and learning resources to start your coding journey. Look out for the tool of the month which is not your ordinary code snippet manager.

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Table of contents

Who’s Tracking Who?
Learning Resources
Coding Resources
Web Tool of the Month
The Best of the Rest in November 2023

Who’s Tracking Who?

Data privacy remains a common issue on the internet. We all like free things but, unfortunately, our privacy is compromised. Have you ever talked about something and then it magically appears in your Facebook feed? A few years ago, I had a conversation about an old Xbox game with a pupil at work and twenty minutes later I received an email from Amazon with the exact game.

At the time I found it intrusive and disabled Alexa on my phone. I guess we have to live with it and the only way to avoid it is to remove yourself from any online activity. With every service going online, that will not happen anytime soon.

If you accept every privacy policy by default, which we do as nobody has the time to read them, and are curious about who is collecting your data and what they do with it. You will find the terms of service, didn’t read useful. The service is still in its infancy and highlights what companies do with your data. You will find companies retaining data, even after you have closed your account and companies tracking your visits to other websites. There are use cases to back it up. Very interesting indeed.

Learning Resources

It’s a common theme through this blog and you may have noticed that I like to publish learning resources. This month’s episode of the magazine is no exception. If it’s your frontend skills that you need to improve you can choose from 26 frontend certifications for web developers where you can learn the basics of HTML & CSS through to JavaScript, React and Vue.

If frontend dev isn’t your thing and you want to tackle other programming opportunities including computing science, game dev, AI and machine learning you may find 39 programming courses for beginner developers useful.

Coding Resources

Are you familiar with the CSS grid? It can be tricky to grasp with so many ways to build your grid and so many ways to arrange it in the order you wish. I came across an interactive guide to the CSS grid that may help ease this woe.

Heard of SOLID? It’s a set of principles that help you write better code. One way to learn the five principles is through a set of examples written in JavaScript.

Web Tool Of The Month

The tool of the month is a snippet manager with an edge. Pieces is a code snippet manager with copilot integrated into the desktop app. Its multi-platform features extensions for Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, Chromium-based browser extension, Obsidian, MS Teams and Jupyter.

Snippets can be saved through the extensions, copied from images and generated through copilot. You can add your projects and it will scan through and find snippets that you can save.