Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

38th 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 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 2023 as a Python Developer…

Python Virtual Environments 🧱

How do Python developers deal with virtual environments?

This article classifies the virtual environment management techniques and options you have out there.

The Python Paradox 🌱

This is a fun historical read.

It was written in 2004 so you will notice how times have changed, but in those times, Python was still a young little language that was used by "enthusiasts".

Python 3.12 Perf 🐉

3.12 brings perf profiling!

In this article you take a look at how the new perf profiling support helps reduce your dummy Python script from 36 seconds to 0.8 seconds. Really cool!

Ready to have your mind blown? How about continuous profiling?

Advent of Code 2022 🎄

If you are a ZTM Academy member, you know that Advent of Code in December is one of the best ways to improve your problem solving skills with coding.

This person wrote an article about what they learned during the month of December.

Worth a read.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

This weekend, your challenge is to go through this repository and learn about some of the Python Design Patterns!

Modules, Not Microservices 🏯

A hackernews user said it very well:

Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization.

There's two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that need it).

The first problem, modules, can be solved at the language level. Modules can do that job, and that's the point of this blog post.

The second problem, scalability, is harder to solve at the language level in most languages outside those designed to be run in a distributed environment.

But most people need it a lot less than they think. Normally the database is your bottleneck and if you keep your application server stateless, you can just run lots of them; the database can eventually be a bottleneck, but you can scale up databases a lot.

Databases in 2022: A Year in Review 📦

This is a great post by a well known person in the industry (Dr. Andy Pavlo) detailing some of the highlights of the database world in 2022.

What happened and what should you take note of?

Read it all here.

News Around the World 🗺

• Previous Director of AI at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, uses Github Copilot... maybe you should too? He also did a video on how to build ChatGPT from Scratch.

• CircleCI says hackers stole encryption keys and customers’ secrets.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Microsoft Hopes OpenAI’s Chatbot Will Make Bing Smarter... so they decided to invest $10 billion into the project. Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. Check out this article for a discussion about whether Microsoft's investment is a good idea or not.

• Tech layoffs are everywhere. This time around Google announced 12,000 employees will be let go. The above is the formal letter. The truthful letter is here. Are you be worried about all these tech layoffs? If so, check this out and you'll be less worried.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• This may be the coolest web app ever built

• A cool website: 4 Thousand Weeks

• Everything is fine. Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robot Atlas is now tossing tool bags around a construction site

• These are ducks right?

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering.

This is an important article for you to read. In my day to day job, I read articles like these all the time. A lot of them give advice that is quite valuable.

However, I don't think I have ever read an article that is so valuable and to the point.

If there is one thing you read this month, make sure it's this one. My favourite one is: Code is secondary. Business value is first.

If you like stuff like this, I also recommend you check out this for 20 more additional insights.

Bonus: I also wanted to add this to the Best Resource of the Month. It's not related to tech, but perhaps reading this will give you a fresh perspective today. Trust me on this.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• Best debugging in Python?

• Free resume templates for you to shine like the star you are

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.