Web Dev News for July 11

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Newsletter highlights

I launched a website! Check it out here: https://nlvcodes.com

Payload CMS 3.47–3.48 add better /me queries, findDistinct, and general polish.
Next.js 15.4.x ship a broad maintenance sweep and stability patches.
Ecosystem: Vercel launches BotID, Railway/Raycast tweak features, Tailwind stays idle.
And more!

PayloadCMS

Versions 3.47 and 3.48 were released. v3.47 adds more and better /me API options as well as a sanitizeUserDataForEmail helper function. Several other improvements include smarter admin redirects and delated toast feedback for large exports.

v3.48 introduced the findDistinct method, which allows you to return only unique values. The Payload team also implemented a few security updates and did some work on the import-export plugin.

Featured Tutorial

Tailwind works great until you try to make it dynamic. There are workarounds, though, and this video covers a few of them!

Next.js

Next.js v15.4.1 (and .2, .3, and .4!) were all released since last newsletter. v15.4.1 delivered a broad maintenance sweep, which fixed duplicate-param and RSC-redirect oddities, tightened dev-overlay and error handling, polished URL/prefetch behavior, improved Turbopack caching, and bumped React/SWC. But it didn’t add any new features.

The follow-up back-ports (15.4.2-15.4.4) were essentially stability patches: metadata and custom-server regressions, Turbopack’s Windows dist and scope-hoisting bugs, a dev-mode dynamicParams layout edge case, and an SWC v33 upgrade.

On Vercel’s side:

BotID is now available for all frameworks. This is brandless CAPTCHA and advanced bot protection. You’ll want to add this to endpoints like registration, checkout, and AI interactions to protect against bots.
You can now open Vercel documentation in select AI providers, like Claude, v0, and ChatGPT.

TailwindCSS

Tailwind again surprises with no releases.

In other news

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Railway

Error logs have been much improved
Deploying from GitHub is now much faster
Want to sign up for Railway? Check out my affiliate link here!

Raycast

Chat branching is a new experimental feature that allows you to create alternative conversation paths during your conversation. This allows you to backtrack to a point in your original conversation without mixing up context.
Several bug fixes were also introduced in the most recent update.
Want to sign up for Raycast? Here’s my affiliate link.