Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

37th 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 2022 as a Python Developer…

The Origins Of Python 🐢

If you are a python programmer, you simply cannot miss this article. A story that takes you to the very beginning where Python was born. Enjoy this historical lesson.

Parallel Nested For-Loops 🪺

You can convert nested for-loops to execute concurrently or in parallel in Python using thread pools or process pools, depending on the types of tasks that are being executed. This is how to do it.

Comprehensions and Generators 🐉

These 2 powerful constructs of the Python language will help you for a very long time in your career in writing "Pythonic" code. A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”. Enjoy it.

Python and the Future of Programming 🐍

The creator of Python, Guido van Rossum, went on a podcast to talk about Python and the Future of Programming. The part about the speed of Python 3.11 was the most interesting to me.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

ChatGPT is all the hype right now. So this weekend, how about you try this?

Try running python inside ChatGPT using this guide.

Who Controls Parallelism? 🕹

A conflict over who controls parallelism: your application, or the libraries it uses... learn about this problem and how you can solve it here.

Python 3.11 Delivers 🚀

This is a graph of CPU utilization for the web services that power PyPI. They upgraded from 3.10 to 3.11 and saw a significant and correlated drop in CPU usage, nearly half.

Fortress of Logic 🏯

The pioneering programmable computer that John von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

Take a little history lesson in computing by reading this great article. You won't regret it.

ChatGPT Hype 🤖

You couldn't explore the interwebs this month without hearing about ChatGPT. OpenAI's new and improved GPT3 child. How will it affect our future? Is it revolutionary and will it replace your job? Probably not, but it's worth learning about and playing with it. Do this to get caught up:

1. Watch this video to learn the background of ChatGPT and how it works.
2. See how people are fooling "it".
3. This was my favourite one: Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

10 Mostly Dead Languages 📡

This is a fun read. What are the 10 “mostly dead” programming languages that have had a tremendous impact and influence on the programming world? Find out.

Terminal, Console, and Shell 🧐

A deep dive into what a Terminal, Console and Shell are. If you are a developer you use these every day, but do you actually know what they are, their history and their differences? Trust me, you're going to want to read this.

PS. ZTM has a Bash course... it's pretty good if I say so myself.

News Around the World 🗺

• If you haven't heard about it yet, SBF and FTX are the two of the most common 3 letter acronyms around the web these days. Here is how to scam people out of billions. The story gets crazier with each passing day.

• A big breakthrough was made in Fusion Energy this month: ignition using LESS energy than what it produced. Fusion energy has a potential to create clean, sustainable energy in the future to replace all. Still early, but a huge scientific breakthrough.

• Okta's source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked... oops.

Big Tech News 🏢

• TSMC’s US fab will make 4nm chips for Apple, AMD and Nvidia: The chip manufacturing giant is trying to help meet demand from its big US clients.

• Battle between Coinbase and Apple is happening. Should Apple be allowed to charge the 30% fee on all gas prices? You decide...actually no, you have no say, Apple decides.

• Apple is planning to move 40-45% iPhone production to India, away from China. Expect the Indian market to explode like China did over the next couple of years.

• More Apple news: Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon which means you will be able to build iOS apps natively using Core ML and Stable Diffusion (that thing that makes you create really cool art pieces using text).

• John Carmack leaves Meta. Meta's VR division is getting more and more negative press with each passing day.

• Uber's nifty little trick: Devpod - Improving Developer Productivity at Uber with Remote Development.

• This isn't big tech news but a jab at what I thought was a terrible model (because we all know our ZTM model is the way to go ;)). BloomTech/Lambda School isn't doing too well.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Remember Space Cadet?

• Launch and asteroid and see what happens.

• Stable Diffusion is cool, but you know what's cooler? Riffusion.

• You like jazz? You like websites? Good.

• Someone actually spent time building this...Seriously, this is the kind of stuff you follow this newsletter for right?! All the other industry newsletters suck :P.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

A discussion needs to be had around the future of the web, the internet, and all of technology.

The idea of an all-knowing computer program comes from science fiction and should stay there. Despite the seductive fluency of ChatGPT and other language models, they remain unsuitable as sources of knowledge. We must fight against the instinct to trust a human-sounding machine.

No, your job isn't going to be taken over by AI. Working with tools to better assist your work and creativity is where the future is.

Read this article first, and then follow it up with the next one which was my favourite one from the month.

Best article of the month: AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off.

What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake?

Trick of the Month 🎩

• Extism allows you to run code no matter the language in any of your projects! (Extism, at its core, is a code runtime built in Rust. Underneath the hood, thy run WebAssembly code as the plug-in execution format). Keep an eye out on this project.

• Obsidian Canvas - An infinite space to visualize and make sense of your ideas.

Happy New Year everyone... 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.