Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

53rd issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all the previous issues of my monthly Python newsletter here.

Python Developer Monthly Newsletter

If it’s your first time here, welcome, keep reading. If you're a long time reader, welcome back, you can skip to the next section to dive right into this month's newsletter.

Being a Python developer is a fantastic career option. Python is the most popular programming language with lots of growing job demand (especially in the fields of Web, Data Science, A.I., and Machine Learning). You have many job opportunities, you can work around the world, and you get to solve interesting problems.

One of the hardest parts though? Staying up-to-date with the constantly evolving ecosystem.

You want to be a top-performing python developer, but you don’t have time to select from hundreds of articles, videos and podcasts coming out every day.

That's why I write this every month to help you out.

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 Python 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 2024 as a Python Developer…

Reflex for the Web 🤹‍♂️

This is a very cool project that brings Python to the web world.

Reflex is pure Python web framework that allows anyone who knows Python to easily build web apps and share them with the world, without needing to learn a new language and piecing together a bunch of different tools.

Weird Python Lists 📄

A look at the internals of list implementation in CPython to understand this weird quirk about them... because Python lists can sometimes act strange: A great way to learn the internal workings of the list data structure.

Python Security Best Practices 🦅

Python’s flexibility in web development, data analysis, and machine learning projects has made it one of the most popular languages in the world, but with its flexibility come many security implications.

This article goes over the 5 best practices that can help you keep your applications more secure.

State of Python 2024 🪩

A great keynote talk from PyCon Philippines 2024: Here is the state of Python.

trip, lstrip, rstrip Gotchas 🔬

In Python, .strip(), .lstrip(), and .rstrip() can be a little tricky.

Here are the gotchas you have to be aware of when using these methods for string manipulation.

Ruff 0.4.0 🧸

Ruff is an extremely fast Python linter and formatter, written in Rust.

Ruff can be used to replace Black, Flake8 (plus dozens of plugins), isort, pydocstyle, pyupgrade, and more, all while executing tens or hundreds of times faster than any individual tool.

They just released version 0.4.0!

News Around the World 🗺

• In response to an Executive Order from President Biden, The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) has asked the public for comments on “Open-Weight AI Models” —models like LLaMa, Stable Diffusion, and Mixtral—which are freely distributed to the public. They are considering blocking access these models in order to prevent abuse. Is that good or bad?

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta released Meta Llama 3. Now available with both 8B and 70B pretrained and instruction-tuned versions to support a wide range of applications... it's their answer to the OpenAI / Google battle that have "closed" models.

• Meta also announced the new Meta Horizons OS which powers their AR/VR goggles. They are trying to do what Windows did back in the day (and then Apple) by hoping everyone will use their OS for AR/VR needs.

• Ten years ago, Microsoft released the source for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 to the Computer History Museum. This code holds an important place in history and is a fascinating read of an operating system that was written entirely in 8086 assembly code nearly 45 years ago. This month, Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Really cool concept for a website, plus who doesn't love Mario Kart stats.

• Isn't it awesome that you can build such a thing on the web?

• Infinitely scrollable town: Infinitetown

• Another impressive web project... lot's of them this month eh?

Is Prompt Engineering A Thing? 🧝🏻

We explore this topic in our newest course. Turns out, like with most things in life, there are smart ways and bad ways of using a tool.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Programming Is Mostly Thinking. Did you know that?

Pretend you have a really great programming day.

*You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don't get distracted or interrupted much, don't have to do a bunch of status or time reporting, and you put in a good six hours of serious programming.

I want to review your work in the morning, so I print out a diff of your day's work before going home.

Sadly, overnight the version control system crashes and they have to recover from the previous day's backup. You have lost an entire day's work.

If I give you the diff, how long will it take you to type the changes back into the code base and recover your six-hours' work?

Programming is 11/12ths Thinking... and I agree with this article. I highly recommend this read.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• A.I. pair programming in your terminal!

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.