Python Monthly (December 2020)

13th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read the previous issues of the Python Monthly newsletter here.

If it’s your first time here… (otherwise, skip this part)

Being a Python developer is a fantastic career option. Python is now the most popular language with lots of growing job demand (especially in the fields of Web, Data Science and Machine Learning). 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 python developer, coder, programmer, 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 Python world. What’s the 20% that will get you 80% of the results?

What you missed in December as a Python Developer…

Python Type Checking 👨‍🎨

Did you know you can do type checking in Python? You can use mypy, pyre, pyright, pytype, pyanalyze and many others. Here is an overview of the type checking landscape in Python and why this feature is something useful for larger projects with lots of team members.

How To Build Spotify 🎧

Or at least an interesting feature from Spotify: How to analyze people's taste in music using Python. You can read the steps that this person used to determine this and lay it out in a nice visual way.

Weekend Project Idea 🎏

This is another one of those projects that is a great talking point during your next interview. All you need is twitter and a little bit of Python knowledge. Let me know if this works out for you. Self-Quoting Tweet

Not Not Python 🎭

not is an important keyword in Python that can sometimes get tricky to use. In this article, you will learn all the ways not might confuse us, but also how to use not properly. Enjoy it.

Holiday Gift 🎁

I feel like we know each other well by now... and as you know, this newsletter takes me a really long time to write every month. Between reading all the articles that come out, sifting through the best ones, and forcing my fingers to type this ever expanding newsletter, it's a lot of work. The effort makes it all worth it because of the fact that people read it though. Therefore, please take a second right now to share this newsletter with friends and others in the industry this holiday season. The more readers that this gets, the more I can invest in continuing to do this every month :)

Did you share it? If you did, you're the best and you can keep reading...

Amazon has $2B Worth of IPV4 Addresses 💵

What does that mean and how can you find that out? It's a simple python script that you can write to see how many IP addresses a company has: Find out about it here.

Python Object System 🍇

Continuing the series we have been linking to in the past newsletters, in this new part, we take a look at the Python Object system (everything in Python is pretty much and object) and how it works.

Cron Jobs With Python 🎡

With Python, there is always a lot of libraries and options for solving any particular problem and running scheduled or recurring jobs is no exception. Whether you want to run simple deferred task, bunch of scheduled jobs or manage cron tabs, there’s specialized library for that in Python. So, in this article you get an overview of all the options available to help you choose the right tool for the task at hand, as well as their use cases, including intro and basic examples to get you started quickly.

What Is Data Engineering? 🏭

If you have taken our ZTM Machine Learning and Data Science course, you already know these things, but for those that skipped out, here is an overview of what Data Engineers do and what tools they use.

Python At Instagram 📸

Did you know that Instagram is powered by Python? The engineers at Instagram released an article this month showing a new technique they developed to improve Python at their scale. It's called Strict Modules and you can learn about it here.

Remember, Python is not slow.

NumPy Illustrated 🎨

One of the most popular libraries to use with Python now has a nice visual tutorial for you to get started with it. A nice easy overview of what it does and how you can benefit from it.

PyQT 🏋🏼

PyQT is a popular tool for building GUIs. In this tutorial you will learn how to create professional looking GUI applications using PyQT.

Once you are done with the above, learn how to use PyQT to interact with an SQL database.

Speaking of databases...

Use An ORM 🪝

Budding developers learning Model-View-Controller frameworks are taught that they should use an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) to interface with their databases. But the “why” is often brushed aside or omitted entirely, leaving a fledgeling programmer with burning questions like ”What are ORMs, anyway?” and “What problems do they solve?”. Learn how to use and ORM with Python.

News Around the World 🗺

Probably one of the biggest hacks this decade happened and we are still finding out the implications of this attack: Highly Evasive Attacker Leverages SolarWinds Supply Chain to Compromise Multiple Global Victims With SUNBURST Backdoor. The company that discovered this attack was also hacked. The bad news is that SolarWind customers are really important and big companies/government agencies. Expect more to come out around this story in the coming months.
Fusion energy device sets a record by running for 20 seconds

Big Tech News 🏢

Big news this month in the tech world is all of the anti trust cases that are happening. Facebook is in the worst position as the biggest antitrust case in a generation has been compared to the years-long lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998. Google is also in trouble. Even Chinese company, Alibaba, is in trouble.
The big deal in the tech world is the new M1 chip from Apple. Because it is a new type of chip, this means a lot of software products need to adjust their software to work on this new chip, including the popular Homebrew tool. Expect more and more software to be M1 compatible in the coming months. M1 chip is making so many waves that even Amazon is bringing macOS to its AWS and is putting Mac minis in the cloud. If you are an Apple fan boy, here are the top 20 apps from the 2020 App Store. One last Apple news: for the first time in a million years Apple actually release a tutorial for something. Learn to use SwiftUI and Xcode by building an app.
Big news out of Amazon who is able to offer Strong Consistency in their S3 storage buckets. For those not in the know, that is a very hard problem they have just solved. Read more about it here. They also announced AWS Amplify Admin UI. Think of it as Firebase from AWS, but much better (apparently). They also announced they want to train 29 Million people to work in the cloud (THEIR cloud). Super random but Amazon even has a Map feature now like Apple and Google maps.
Salesforce just acquired Slack for $27.7Billion. Umm what!?
Apple and Cloudflare developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.
Google had a big outage across their products and people lost their minds.
Like many other internet firms, Twitter has decided to migrate core services from its own data centers to a public cloud infrastructure on AWS.
Hyundai has just bought Boston Dynamics.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Pixar put their Universal Scene Description (USD) that they use on PyPi.
The story of AlphaFold.
Your childhood dream come true.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Axioms are truths that you can use to guide the principles and practices you follow throughout your programming career. If you follow these truths and take the writer's word for it, you will probably come out of the other end a well rounded programmer that will go far in their career. Enjoy one of the best pieces I have read on this topic.

Trick of the Month 🎩

How to write an effective developer resume.
Make Opera not war.
You can now pick your theme for Github.

See you next month everyone!

By the way, my full time job is to 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 of my courses by visiting the courses page.