Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

29th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all 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 April 2022 as a Python Developer…

Python in Science 👩‍🔬

Scientific uses of Python do not rely on plain Python. Instead, Python is used as a gluing layer, relying on compiled optimized packages that it strings together to perform the target computation.

The most widespread package in scientific computing is probably NumPy, for Numerical Python. Learn how Python has taken over the scientific world despite some calling it a "slow" programming language. Read all about it here.

Automate Your Work 🏗

This person asked what Python modules or packages people use to automate their work. There were some good and interesting answers.

Python f-strings 📝

Formatted string literals — also called f-strings — have been around since Python 3.6, so we all know what they are and how to use them. There are however some facts and handy features of f-string that you might not know about.

This article will show you some awesome f-string features that you’ll want to use in your everyday coding.

Cython Graduated College 👨‍🎤

Cython turned 20 this month! It was invented and designed as a compiler that extended the Python language with C data types to build extension modules for CPython... and it is still going strong.

Python Projects That Get You Hired 🛠

What kind of projects are good for a resume using Python? - A redditor asked... here are the answers from the community.

By the way here is how to get paid while learning to code.

What Python Jobs Can You Have? 🧑‍🌾

Another great Q&A item. This person asked what jobs they can have if they know Python. The short answer is: A lot of jobs. The longer answers are here.

Python In The Browser 💻

The Python community has been discussing the best way to make Python a first-class citizen in the modern web browser for a long time. The biggest challenge is the fact that web browsers really only support one programming language: JavaScript. However, with WebAssembly, that all changes. Here is how to run Python in the browser using WebAssembly.

Python Type Hints ⌨️

An interesting perspective of why Python type hints aren't that great. I tend to agree with this one.

If you are super into type hints though, you should read this article too.

Security Announcement 💣

On April 12, GitHub Security began an investigation that uncovered evidence that an attacker abused stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis-CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including npm. Read about it here especially if you use Heroku or Travis-CI.

How To Lose Your Stars ✨

Github stars are the developer version of Pokémon cards in the school yard. The more you have, the cooler you are to your peers. Well, this is how you lose 54,000 stars on Github overnight (Tip: Don't make your repo private).

News Around the World 🗺

• The tech world (including our very own Daniel Bourke) was all talking about Dall-E 2 this month. A new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. You can see some of the amazing examples here.

• A reminder that web scraping is legal in the U.S.A.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time. Hundreds of companies lost access to JIRA, Confluence and OpsGenie. What can engineering teams learn from the poor handling of this outage?

• Shopify better watch out. Amazon just announce Buy With Prime which is essentially a direct competitor to Shopify.

• Everyone can't stop talking about this one: Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44 Billion.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• How much time do you have left today?

• Is this the best Drone flight ever taken?

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Do you remember Oregon Trail? For those that don't know, Oregon Trail was a CLASSIC game that everyone in the 90s played. The resource of the month shows you how you can recreate this classic game using Python while teaching you important principles of the language.

"Most game players will remember the video game made famous with the Apple II and other computers of the era. Not many will remember that this game was originally a text-based game played on a teletype. This game version is the one I played in the late 1970s from my days in High School."

Read the article and enjoy the long post.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• This is super cool. Watch out iTerm2... WARP a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal built for the 21st century.

• How to enable DNS over HTTPS. A way to make sure others don't know the websites that you visit.

See you next month everyone... also share this with your friends... pretty please! ❤️

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 couple of my courses below or see all ZTM courses here.