Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

41st 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 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 2023 as a Python Developer…

Programmer Interrupted 🫥

Interruptions and context switching are the two most costly factors that directly impact a programmer's daily productivity. Although there is no permanent way to avoid them, there are some interesting strategies to minimize their impact.

Doing Python Monolith Right 💅

A deep dive into how to structure your monolith Python project. This is a series that you should keep your eye on. First part is all about structure and tooling.

Wolverine 🐺

A developer created a “regenerative” AI program that fixes bugs on the fly: Wolverine can fix Python bugs at runtime and re-run the code. Very cool.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

Tell me this isn't the greatest project idea ever. Add this to your portfolio and impress all future employers, family members, and pets.

Evolution of Pandas 🐼

A great look at one of the most popular Python library: Pandas.

Pandas 2.0 vs Pandas 1.3 comparison shows you how much faster this new major upgrade of Pandas has become.

Astral 🪐

Keep an eye out on Astral. Their first product is Ruff - a python linter written in Rust.

Trusted Publishers 🌝

PyPI introduced a new security feature: Trusted Publishers. PyPI package maintainers can adopt a new, more secure publishing method that does not require long-lived passwords or API tokens to be shared with external systems.

Read the reactions here.

Don't know what a Python Package is? Here is a primer for you.

Dependency Injection in Python 🎯

Python’s growing popularity has resulted in the development of larger and more intricate projects. This expansion has driven developers to explore high-level software design patterns... Dependency Injection is an important principle in all programming languages.

What does it all mean? Read this.

How Sharding Works 🧇

If you’ve used Google or YouTube, you’ve probably accessed sharded data. Sharding helps you scale out your database by storing partitions of your data across multiple servers instead of putting everything on a single giant one.

This post will walk through how database sharding works, how to think about implementing your own sharded database, and some useful tools out there that can help, with a particular focus on MySQL and Postgres.

Do you like all this Database stuff? Then learn SQL by playing a game.

Cheetah the Coding Interview 🐆

Is this cheating? Or is this just being a good problem solver?

Whisper & GPT-based app for crushing remote Software engineering interviews. If you get a job with this... do let us know 😛.

How Load Balancing Works ⚖️

Most websites that you visit have some sort of load balancing in order to not crash their app when too many users visit at once. So how does it all work?

We cover this topic in our courses, but if you're looking for a brief overview, here it is.

News Around the World 🗺

• Brave Search removes last remnant of Bing from search results page, achieving 100% independence and providing real alternative to Big Tech search.

Big Tech News (AKA ChatGPT News) 🏢

• Twitter is sharing the inner workings of the algorithm they use. On April fools, they even did this one funny thing.

• Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games (Fortnite)... this is a big win for Apple.

• AI battle is continuing. Microsoft is building its own artificial intelligence chips for powering the large-language models responsible for understanding and generating humanlike language.

• Google announced the release of Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.

• Keep an eye on this new way of using GPT "agents": Auto-GPT.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Robots are taking over the world one piano at a time.

• Can water solve a maze?

• Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station.

• This is how you can get creative and play with the scrolling of your website. Genius idea.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

You may have a love/hate relationship with ChatGPT and according to a recent survey we did, not many of you think it will replace your job (I agree).

However, it is something you should pay attention to and stay on top of because your other python developer friends are learning to use it. So while ChatGPT itself isn't going to replace you... a good developer that learns how to 10x their output using ChatGPT totally could.

I recommend reading this article: Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting.

A lot of people who claim to be doing prompt engineering today are actually just blind prompting.

"Blind Prompting" is a term used to describe the method of creating prompts with a crude trial-and-error approach paired with minimal or no testing and a very surface level knowledge of prompting.

Blind prompting is not prompt engineering, and Prompt Engineering might make you a better developer.

Finally, watch this video: How LLMs like ChatGPT are Revolutionizing Software Engineering.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Phind: The AI search engine for developers... use it like this.

Thanks for reading!

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 few of our courses below or see all ZTM courses here.