Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

51st 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 February 2024 as a Python Developer…

Dependency Shmendency 🏗

This is the first in hopefully a series of posts about how to build, manage, and deploy Python applications in as boring a way as possible. Boring is usually safe and easy.

Here is how to do Python dependency management.

Weekend Project Idea 🍻

This may be one of the coolest projects you will ever build and a great project to discuss during your interviews (since it will sound impressive): A search engine in 80 lines of Python.

The Rye Option 🍞

Rye is a new vision on how Python packaging should work. As some of you may know, it is a bit of a disaster in the packaging world right now (for Python).

Rye tries to improve Python packaging and project management. It looks promising.

From the author:

"I still don't really know if Rye should exist. It has not yet become established and there are plenty of rough edges.

I personally really enjoy using it but at the same time every time I use it, I get reminded that it would stop existing if I did not invest time into it which in some sense is what keeps me going on it.

However I would love to see the community converge to a Rye like solution, no matter where it comes from."

uv Light 🪄

uv is an extremely fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust, and designed as a drop-in replacement for pip and pip-tools workflows. Worth a try.

Oh, and related to Rye above, the uv team announced:

"As part of this release, we're also taking stewardship of Rye, an experimental Python packaging tool from Armin Ronacher. We'll maintain Rye as we expand uv into a unified successor project, to fulfill our shared vision for Python packaging."

Free Python Book 📒

Think Python 3rd edition just came out and it's free for you to read online. Think Python is an introduction to Python for people who have never programmed before – or for people who have tried and had a hard time.

Learn How GPT Works 🩻

This is the best article I have read in describing the GPT system and how it works as simple as possible.

Trust me on, this: Read at least the first half of this article and your mind will be blown.

Let's Talk Philosophy 🧘‍♀️

Believe it or not, I hate writing blog posts. Writing this newsletter is the one piece of content I write a month, and it pains me (hey, enough of you read it now so I can't stop).

Despite this, I decided to finally write down what I think are important principles in learning.

These are the 10 Learning Commandments.

OK, no more blog posts from me other than this newsletter. I retire. I hope you like this one!

News Around the World 🗺

• Everyone be happy: FCC Makes AI-Generated Voices in Robocalls Illegal

• Japan is betting $67 billion on becoming the next big chip maker.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Apple released the Vision Pro, AR headset. Here is the technical breakdown of the product that people are getting excited about. Speaking of Apple, they are also being a little cheeky.

• One more bit of Apple news: they quietly announced new encryption for iMessages. PQ3 introduces resilient encryption and extensive defences against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks.

• TSMC (that big chip factory out of Taiwan) is going to build their second chip factory in Japan. A big sigh of relief for those worried about geopolitics and chip manufacturing.

• Turns out all this A.I. is good for the GPU business. Nvidia has now become more valuable than Google and Amazon.

• Google released their newest A.I. model: Gemini 1.5 (formerly known as Bard). Then they made an oopsie and pulled some parts of it.

• A nice move by OpenAI to reward their employees. If you're a ZTM student working at OpenAI, shoot me an email. Would love to do an interview ;).

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

This is pretty creative. What will your alchemy create?

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

I guess we have to talk about the biggest news this month: Sora. The crazy part? This is the worst it's going to get.

To understand how big of a deal this is, I recommend watching this video.

Once you finish that video, watch this one on some of the limitations, and possible solutions.

Once you watch the above 2 you should be caught up to speed to the current state of Sora. Keep an eye out on this space, it's going to change a lot of things.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Look like you're debugging websites at work while playing DOOM. DOOM rendered via console.log() in a web browser.

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.