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WebDevPro #89: Microsoft Phi-4, React Router Updates, and JS Exploits🌍🔍

Crafting the Web: Tips, Tools, and Trends for Developers

New developer products provide a glimpse into the future of app building on HubSpot, including deeper extensibility, flexible UI, modern development tools, and more

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HubSpot’s AI-powered ecosystem presents a global opportunity projected to reach $10.2 billion by 2028. To fuel that growth potential, we are opening up our platform more –introducing an expanded set of APIs, customizable app UI, and tools that better support a unified data strategy.

Start Building Today

Hi ,

The ecosystem’s shifting again—leaner AI models, smarter frameworks, and a browser funding shakeup that might just ripple through how we build, deploy, and monetize on the web. From core infra to career signals, it’s a high-signal lineup for devs who want to stay ahead.👀

This week, we’re unpacking:

🧠 Phi-4 vs GPT-4: Microsoft’s compact model challenges the giants
⚛️ React Router 7.5: Cleaner transitions, better route handling
🐞 libjs Exploit: A real-world memory bug dissected
💸 Browser Revenue Crash?: Cookie deprecation’s 80% impact
🧵 AWS RDS Gaps: PostgreSQL consistency in question
🎯 Hiring Trends: April 2025 insights from tech recruiters

Want to be featured in WebDevPro? Share your tips or takes—we’re all ears!

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Latest news: what's new in web development? 🧑‍💻

AI’s slimming down, browsers are sweating, and your stack just got some surprise updates. Here’s what’s actually worth your attention!

🐞 Breaking the Browser: Inside Ladybird’s JS Exploit : One flawed concat method. One crafty dev. Jessie Ye reverse-engineers a memory bug in Ladybird’s libjs—and turns it into a full-on exploit. Deep cuts for JS engine nerds and C++ tinkerers alike.

💸 Web Browsers Are About to Go Broke(ish): When third-party cookies crumble, so might browser funding. Dan Fabulich breaks down how Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge could lose up to 80% of their revenue—turns out “free” browsers weren’t really free after all.

🧠 Phi-4 Punches Above Its Weight: Microsoft’s new Phi-4 is lean, mean, and surprisingly smart—rivaling GPT-4 performance with a fraction of the size. If you're building AI apps that need speed and efficiency without the cloud bill drama, this one’s a game-changer.

🧵Jepsen Uncovers Amazon RDS Consistency Bugs:Kyle Kingsbury (aka Jepsen) reveals data anomalies in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4. Think writes getting lost and reads going stale. If you trust AWS with your data layer, read this twice.

⚛️ React Router 7.5.0 Gets Smoother:No drama, just dev-friendly upgrades. The latest release adds smarter route matching, cleaner transitions, and fewer surprises in nested layouts. If you’ve wrestled with async loading or route weirdness in your React SPA, this update’s got your back.

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Ready to "Vibe Code" the right way?

Don’t miss your shot to learn the AI coding workflow in just 3 hours.

Expert corner: what's the web community talking about?🎙

Forget polished demos—this is the real-world grind. From agent fails to solo-stack wins, these are the lessons, hacks, and hot takes bubbling up from the builders who’ve been there.

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🧠 AI Agents in Practice? Expect Mess, Not Magic: Agent workflows sound magical until you build one. This post gets real about memory limits, flaky context, and why most agent orchestration is still held together with duct tape.

🔌 The Solo Dev Framework That Actually Ships: What if one dev built their own Rails? Bram Jetten shows how and why his custom framework beats bloated boilerplate—and why solo doesn’t mean scrappy.

🧪 LLMs and Databases Can Get Along. Here’s Proof: Hooking LLM agents into real data is risky—but this guide shows how to do it cleanly with a Model Control Plane in Go. No prompt hacks, no query chaos—just smart, secure execution.

📈 JavaScript Job Hunt? Here’s What Actually Gets You Hired:TypeScript skills? Still hot. Testing? Non-negotiable. This hiring manager roundup cuts through the noise on what tech leads want—and what’s just resume fluff.

🔍 The Real Work Starts After the Code Is Clean: You shipped the feature—but did anyone understand it? This post reframes dev success around clarity, feedback, and flow, not just syntax and style.

🧩 Stack Overflow Isn’t Dead, You’re Just Not Using It Right:For edge-case bugs and cross-platform weirdness, community forums still beat AI chat. This post makes the case for old-school Q&A as your secret weapon in 2025.

Packt catalogue: must-read dev books📚

Need a break from bug hunting? Here’s a solid read from the Packt shelf.

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Spring System Design in Practice

Go beyond writing code—start designing systems that scale. This hands-on guide walks you through real-world system design using Spring and Spring Boot. From breaking down business requirements to building resilient, cloud-ready microservices, you’ll get the patterns, tools, and best practices you need to architect high-performance applications with confidence.

Perfect for devs moving from CRUD apps to serious system design.

GRAB YOUR COPY!

While AI writes your code... ⏳

The AI’s typing. You’re waiting. Use the pause like a pro:

📘 Debug smarter: Skim JavaScript from Beginner to Professional for hands-on tips that go beyond console.log.

🎨Tidy up UI: Align that misbehaving button with help from Designing and Prototyping Interfaces with Figma.

🧪Audit performance: Run Lighthouse, then explore fixes in Progressive Web Application Development by Example.

🧹Clean up Copilot’s mess: Refactor confidently with Clean Code in JavaScript.

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Exclusive expert spotlight continues: Miško Hevery on the Future of Web Dev 🎤

We’re back with another exclusive snippet from our chat with Miško Hevery, the mind behind AngularJS, Angular, and Qwik.

Miško shares how he uses LLMs to work faster, learn quicker, and stay in control of the code they generate.

Our full conversation is rolling out in segments—and this segment is just the next drop. More to follow on X (Twitter).👀

Follow along to catch upcoming clips as they roll out, and stay tuned—future issues of WebDevPro will bring even more exclusive insights from the full sit-down.

More exclusive footage from Miško and other experts is on the way—keep an eye on WebDevPro and X !🎬

Packt: How are LLMs changing the way you approach everyday development tasks?

Miško Hevery: I find it super helpful when I just, you know, ask for help from the LLMs. I know what I want, and I can share the code with it. I'm just saying, like, "Hey, can you find me this? How do I do this?"—because I forget all the time. You know—generate a function for me. And then I'm like, does that make sense? I have to kind of go through it. A lot of times, just writing out the function is really about understanding what's happening. Without that, it’s kind of tricky.

There's a difference between just building a website and building something that's algorithmically intensive. If you're just gluing existing code together, and there's not much in terms of algorithms, LLMs can be really helpful. But if you're working on something algorithmic, you really want to understand all of the parts.

In both cases, I think it's extremely helpful that LLMs just kind of help you out with what you're doing. Getting good at prompting and using them daily is super helpful—and it will definitely improve your productivity.

You know, I was building a website and toying with Firebase. I’d never created a Firebase app from scratch, so I didn’t know all the APIs. It was so nice to ask the LLM, "How do I open a record? Add an item?"—and it gave me pretty good answers. I still had to modify the code, move things around, but it made building significantly faster. I didn’t have to read blog posts or reverse-engineer toy examples. I could just ask, “Can you generate this for me?” And there it was.

AI in the spotlight 🔦

Amazon flexes with Nova Premier!

Amazon has entered the heavyweight LLM ring with Nova Premier, its most powerful model yet—and it’s clearly gunning for OpenAI and Google. While they’re tight-lipped on model size, early tests show solid reasoning, multilingual support, and long-context performance.

Here’s the real dev angle: Nova Premier is already live in Bedrock, which means you can plug it into your stack via API—no custom infra needed. If you’re already building on AWS, it just became way easier to spin up LLM-powered features without leaving the ecosystem.

This gives AWS devs a homegrown alternative to GPT-class models—without jumping through OpenAI’s hoops or managing third-party dependencies.

Spotted an AI drop we didn’t cover? Send it in—we’ll shout it out.

Developer tip of the week 💡

Use git stash -p like a surgical dev!

You don’t have to stash everything or nothing. git stash -p lets you interactively stash just the changes you want—line by line.

Perfect for those times when you're halfway through an experiment but only want to commit part of the chaos. Keeps your history clean and your future self grateful.