Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

25th 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 December 2021 as a Python Developer…

Meet PDM 🧶

PDM is a modern Python package manager with PEP 582 support. It installs and manages packages in a similar way to NPM (if you are familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem) that doesn't need to create a virtualenv at all! This looks very promising.

My Top 10 Articles from 2021 👑

I will be releasing this post in a few days. Make sure you subscribe to the blog (that purple box 1 or 2 scrolls up) for when it goes live!

Cool Progress 💫

This is just a fun little package to use as a python programmer. Instantly make your loops show a smart progress meter - just wrap any iterable with tqdm(iterable), and you're done! Here is the package to allow you to do this.

Bank of Python AMA 🏦

We featured last month the “Bank of Python”... a secret world where all these big financial institutions are running their own version of Python. There is now an interesting discussion and AMA on reddit about this world and the programmers that have worked in this space.

Weekend Project Idea 🎏

Follow this tutorial on different ways you can make fast async http requests with python. It goes from the very basics of using the classic requests library, to some more advanced techniques. This weekend, explore these techniques and see if you can measure the different performances of each one. Enjoy!

Github Improvements 🧞‍♂️

Github is rolling out a technology preview for substantial improvements to searching code on GitHub. It’s still in beta but this is going to make your Cntrl+F command on GitHub much nicer. Read all about it here and join the waitlist.

Question of the Month 🔮

Can a function and a local variable in python have the same name like this?:

def foo():
    foo = 5
    print(foo + 5)

foo()

Check out the answer here.

Want a harder one? Sorting multiple lists together in place (without creating temporary objects). Can this be done in Python? Go ahead and read the question here first, then check out the answer. It’s a tough one!

Evolution of Python ⛩

An interesting article outlining some of the newest features added to Python 3. It starts from Python 3.1 all the way to the latest 3.11. Enjoy the read and seeing these features in chronological order.

The Future Is Analog 🕹

Digital? The future is Analog. Check out this video about how future computers may be moving to analog. An excellent video for all those tech nerds out there.

Must Have Django Packages 🔑

A simple question was asked: “what are 3 Django packages everyone should know about?”. Here is what people said.

Model Python Projects 🎎

If you wanted an example of excellent “modern python” to be inspired by, what projects should you look at? This user from hackernews asked the question and received some great answers.

The Python Package Need? 📦

An argument for why the attrs package may be one of the most useful packages to use in python.

News Around the World 🗺

• The Internet is on fire. We can’t talk about the web without including this giant story that has created chaos in the tech world this month. Log4j vulnerability is going to have many more months of consequences. Read what happened here. By the way, here is an example of how this exploit works using Python.

• U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware. NSO Group is stirring up a lot of controversy again.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Amazon is continuing to take over everything. We have reported on this before, but another reminder that they are building their own chips to take on Intel and Nvidia. They will make lots of money from this, I am sure, and be able to pay Italy which just fined Amazon record $1.3 billion for abuse of market dominance.

• Hot finding: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016. The Diaoyu Islands, when viewed in Apple Maps in mainland China, continue to appear on a larger scale than surrounding territories.

• HashiCorp just went public (You may have heard of them if you are in the DevOps world or use Terraform).

• DeepMind’s New AI With a Memory Outperforms Algorithms 25 Times Its Size. The team explains how they first built their own large language model, called Gopher, which is more than 60 percent larger than GPT-3. Then they showed that a far smaller model imbued with the ability to look up information in a database could go toe-to-toe with Gopher and other large language models.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• See the biggest search trends of 2021 from Google.

• What is the most and least used emoji? This may surprise you.

• You suck at Origami.

• Average colour of a country. Australia wins best color.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Creativity. It’s a skill that is not often mentioned as part of the core skills to be considered a great programmer/software developer. I think it should be. Creativity is something you can develop and it’s something that not only creates extremely interesting humans, but also a skill that sets you apart from the rest. Here is an example of creativity.

Our job as programmers is not only to solve useless problems that have no connection to real life. Our job is to use the skill of programming to create, inspire, and sometimes do meaningless things just for fun. That will create a life worth living… and you will have way more fun along the way. So what is your creative project this month?

Another important skill to add to your repertoire is the skill of critically thinking through problems. How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught.

Two amazing resources this month because it’s the end of the year and I like you for being here and reading all the way to this section.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• If you spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, this tool will make reading those articles MUCH nicer.

• This browser extension prevents the sites you specify from appearing in Google search results.

• Step 1: Make yourself sound super important and busy at work. Step 2: Achieve career success.

• A website to help you get past those pesky paywalls on websites.

Happy New Year! 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.