Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

27th 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 February 2022 as a Python Developer…

Security Pitfalls in Python 🕳

Python developers trust their applications to have a solid security state due to the use of standard libraries and common frameworks. However, within Python, just like in any other programming language, there are certain features that can be misleading or misused by developers. Often it is only a very minor subtlety or detail that can make developers slip and add a severe security vulnerability to the code base. Here are the top 10 pitfalls to avoid.

State of the Octoverse 🐙

A popular survey done by Github ever year is here: State of the Octoverse. This survey combines telemetry from 4M+ repositories and surveys from more than 12,000 developers. It reveals current trends and also gives us predictive results.

We can now see with more precision how to achieve successful outcomes for developers, teams, organizations, and communities. Python keeps climbing up and took the #2 spot from Java. Check out the full results!

Listening to Ports 📞

Using Python, this story explores some concepts in computer networking. Code samples can also be found in this repo and it is a fun read to explore what ports on your network really do!

“Shit, what time is it?” he asks.

Things to Automate with Python 🚠

Do you automate things in your life with Python? If not, you should... here some ideas for you.

Weekend Project Idea 🎏

This is a step-by-step tutorial that details how to configure Django to run on Docker with Postgres. For production environments, you'll add on Nginx and Gunicorn. You'll also take a look at how to serve Django static and media files via Nginx.

Follow the weekend project tutorial here.

API Server Code 100x 🚣

Some of the tricks the author used to speed up calls to their analytics API written in Python: played with asyncio, messed with SQLAlchemy, hacked deep in asyncpg, rewrote parts in Cython, found better data structures, replaced some pandas with pure numpy. How we optimized Python API server code 100x.

Clean Python 🏭

"What're the cleanest, most beautifully written projects in Github that are worth studying the code?" This question was asked by a redditor and here are the answers.

Django Goes Black 🏴

In last month's newsletter we told you about a cool new code formatter for Python called Black. Well, apparently the word got out because the Django project is officially using Black to format their codebase!

Python Type Hints 🙆

An interesting discussion on hackernews around the topic of Python and type hints. Are they overused? Maybe we need to think about guidelines so we can have a better balance between clarity and verbosity? What do you think?

Microsoft Loves Python 👩‍💻

If you were not aware, Visual Studio Code is a Microsoft project. They also help with the official Python Extension of which they do a monthly release. Here are the updates to this plugin for February.

Mac Says Bye Bye ✌️

MacOS has officially said bye to Python 2. You will now have to install Python 3 and there will no longer be a default Python installation that comes with your new Mac.

PEP 654 🦿

PEP 654 was just accepted! Check out the details here.

1. A new standard exception type, the ExceptionGroup, which represents a group of unrelated exceptions being propagated together.
2. A new syntax except* for handling ExceptionGroups.

News Around the World 🗺

• When being a software developer really pays: Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” by the New York Times.

• DeepMind, famous for AlphaGo and AlphaFold, just made a huge leap solving novel problems and setting a new milestone in competitive programming: AlphaCode. Machine generated code is getting closer to human levels... watch out ;)

• Feds arrest married couple, seize $3.6 billion in hacked bitcoin funds. This story is straight out of a millennial crime drama. Absolutely wild story still being told.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Facebook parent Meta’s stock suffered its biggest single-day loss yet as the company refocuses on the ‘metaverse’. They also are launching Facebook Pay. What could go wrong here?

• SoftBank dumps sale of ARM over regulatory hurdles... it didn't work out so ARM is going to IPO instead. Chip technology will be a hot topic of discussion in 2022.

• German Court Rules Websites Embedding Google Fonts Violates GDPR. Going to be a nightmare for developers.

• The big battle we have spoken about in this newsletter came to a close. "We’re pleased to share that Elastic and Amazon have resolved the trademark infringement lawsuit related to the term Elasticsearch. Now the only Elasticsearch service on AWS and the AWS Marketplace is Elastic Cloud." Elastic and Amazon Reach Agreement on Trademark Infringement Lawsuit.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Watch Magnus Carlsen (may be the greatest chess player of all time) get stunned by 17-year-old super talent Abdusattorov Nodirbek in chess.

• Spot the animals.

• Why analog computers are coming back.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

I have now written this newsletter every month for over 3 years. Wow, that's a really long time, but why am I telling you all of this? To justify what I am about to do: put my own article as the best resource of the month.

Hear me out though... I NEVER put my own posts as the best resource of the month but I think this one is really really good. Don't believe me? How about you check it out and tell me it's not half decent:

Top 7 Soft Skills For Developers & How To Learn Them

Skills that you can learn to stand out from the rest. Skills that will never become outdated and you will have for life. Intrigued? Go read the article.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• Love emails but hate people? Don’t want someone 🤡 at your party 🥳 but have to invite them 🤢 cause your mom 💁‍♀️ made you? Trust Straight 2 Spam to send your v important email 📧 straight to their spam 🗑. Yes, this tool exists.

• Want to play in a Linux environment on the web? WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running fully client-side on the web.

• Explain shell commands!

• jless — a command-line JSON viewer

• Are you shy? Then here is your trick: The Painfully Shy Developer's Guide to Networking for a Better Job (Without Being Creepy)

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.