Python Monthly (January 2021)

14th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read the previous issues of my monthly Python 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 is the best Python newsletter for you if you want to keep up to date with the industry and keep your skills sharp, without wasting your valuable time.

I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, 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?

Let's dive in. Here's what you missed in January 2021 as a Python Developer…

Advent Of Code Python 🎄

Did you participate in Advent Of Code 2020?

If you happened to use Python, well this repository is probably the best resource for how to write clean/efficient code to answer all of the Advent of Code challenges for 2020. Make sure you compare your answers to this.

Weekend Project Idea 🎏

This is such a fun project idea, I may try it out myself. Using the traceroute command, along with Python, to visualize the hops your internet packets take. Watch the video below first, then grab the source code and play with it yourself.

And Or Python 🐾

A key thing to know about or and and is that they short-circuit. What that means, is that if just the first argument is enough to know the outcome of the expression then the second argument is never evaluated. Compare that to something like addition where both the left-hand side and right-hand side of + are evaluated no matter what. Learn everything about boolean operations in Python here.

From the same author, you can also learn about the for inner workings.

Top 10 Python Libraries 🎧

The rules are simple. Libraries are included that satisfy the following conditions:

They were launched or popularized in 2020.
They are well maintained and have been since their launch.
They are outright cool, and you should check them out.

Here are the results for 2020.

Ditch Excel for Python ⚖️

A case for why you should use Python instead of Excel for your business. Some good points made here.

Python Attributes 🔬

What happens when we get or set an attribute of a Python object? This question is not as simple as it may seem at first. Here is a deep dive into the topic and everything you wanted to know and more.

SciPy Lecture Notes 🧫

SciPy is a standard tool in the scientific community. In this lecture series you will learn all about SciPy, how it is used, and how you can harness its power.

NumPy Tutorial 🎲

I feel like there is one of these every month, but for those who are curious, here is another tutorial on NumPy to get you started in the Data Science world.

If you don't have the patience for that long tutorial above, here is A Visual Intro to NumPy and Data Representation

FastAPI + Python 🍇

An interesting concept here. Implementing FastAPI Services – Abstraction and Separation of Concerns shows you how to build application and service structures for a more maintainable codebase.

XOR 🎡

This is definitely one of those articles that isn't super useful for your day to day coding, but it does teach you about XOR. You will learn an obscure way to solve problems using this trick. There are a whole bunch of popular interview questions that can be solved in one of two ways: Either using common data structures and algorithms in a sensible manner, or by using some properties of XOR in a seemingly hard to understand way.

Pip Bye Bye 🏭

Latest version of pip, finally drops support for Python 2. Nothing new here at this point, but still a significant change to mention as everyone moves towards Python 3.

DeepMind Tree 🌳

Yes, that famous DeepMind that builds crazy AI projects, released a python library called tree. tree is a library for working with nested data structures. In a way, tree generalizes the builtin map function which only supports flat sequences, and allows to apply a function to each "leaf" preserving the overall structure. Read more about it here.

10,000,000 Jupyter Notebooks 🏋🏼

Inspired by research carried out 2 years ago by the Design Lab team at UC San Diego, the JetBrains Datalore team decided to download all Jupyter notebooks accessible in October 2019 and October 2020 to gather statistics on the tools that the global DS community has been using in recent years. Here are the results

News Around the World 🗺

Github blocked an entire company account after one employee opened his laptop while visiting his parents in Iran. However, right after that incident, Github made the call to finally allow Iranian developers full access to Github moving forward.
WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app. A lot of people moving to Signal and Telegram now.
Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’.
Whitehouse.gov chooses WordPress.
Giant leak exposes data from almost all Brazilians
Congratulations to the Nepali climbers who climbed K2 in the winter (K2 was the last of the 14, 8000-meter peaks on Earth that had yet to be climbed in winter).

Big Tech News 🏢

Well this was a crazy month for the Big Tech companies. The conversation around censorship and centralization was a big topic with companies like Facebook and Twitter and others, banning big political figures (guess who).
Amazon and many other companies are trying to battle it out in the Podcast space. Lot's of things happening lately including Amazon recently buying up a podcasting company. Also, here is the story of how AWS got started and how they moved from Sun proprietary servers, to Linux based servers that changed their trajectory.

... but the biggest news from Amazon this month was their open sourcing of Elasticsearch. Long story short: Amazon used Elasticsearch (open source) to make money. Elasticsearch said "that's not fair, we want to make money", so they updated their license to Amazon has to pay to use it. Amazon said: "nah, we'll just fork your repo and make it open source".

YouTube․com is now available to install as a Progressive Web App
GME is trying to enter this category 😂.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

“A damn stupid thing to do” — the origins of C programming language.
Year in search 2020, from Google.
Happy 20th birthday to Wikipedia!
Enjoy wasting the next 30 minutes with this.
So it looks like I did a lot of useless things this month because this section has a lot of links... oops. But here is another thing that will blow your mind.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

By now, you have seen that the best resource of the month usually contains an article or resource that teaches principles and knowledge that can take you many years into your career. That is because fundamentals, are more important to a long and successful career than the latest tricks with a trendy library. Without further ado, here was my favourite resources of the month that have some great advice for you:

My Engineering Axioms

Once you are done with that, here is some advice after 45 years in the software industry.

And since we are on a roll, once you are done with the above, read this.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Hate those Zoom meetings? Now you can deliberately stutter your webcam and glitch your sound. It simulates slow-downs, freeze-frames and lag on your video calls
Block distracting websites so you don't spend all your day on r/wallstreetbets
How to run VS Code as a Container for Remote Development
Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a secondary screen for your computer
Hide your real email address to help protect your identity on Firefox

See you next month everyone!

By the way, I 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 ZTM courses here.