Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

50th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all the previous issues of my monthly Python newsletter here.

Python Developer Monthly Newsletter - January 2024

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 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 January 2024 as a Python Developer…

New year, new me. Let's see what the industry is up to...

Python JIT 🔥

This is the biggest news coming into 2024: Python 3.13 gets a JIT compiler. This change, once accepted would be one of the biggest changes to the CPython Interpreter.

In this blog post, you will learn what this JIT is all about, how it works, and what the benefits are.

You can also check out the interesting discussion happening around this topic here.

Top Libraries of 2023 🏆

Welcome to the 9th and not-yet-quite-a-decade edition of the yearly Top Python Libraries list.

They have been doing this list since 2015 and it is interesting to see the different libraries over the years and how the industry has changed.

Prep for NumPy 2 🍻

If you’re writing scientific or data science code with Python, there’s a good chance you’re using NumPy, directly or indirectly. Pandas, Scikit-Image, SciPy, Scikit-Learn, AstroPy… these and many other packages depend on NumPy.

NumPy 2 is a new major release, with a release candidate coming out February 1st 2024, and a final release a month or two later.

Importantly, it’s backwards incompatible; not in a major way, but enough that some work might be required to upgrade. And that means you need to make sure your application doesn’t break when NumPy 2 comes out.

Here is the article that will prep you for this change.

Python Packages 🛍

What is the current status of the industry when it comes to Python packaging?

It's a bit of a mess right now and this article does a good job showcasing some of that and what to do moving forward.

Dynamic Programming Primer 🪄

Here is how to impress all of your python friends with your Dynamic Programming knowledge.

You're welcome.

Let's Talk About A.I. 🤖

Whether you hate it or not, A.I. and that term is shaking up the industry.

I made a video on the topic and it's free for you to watch: The Future of A.I. and how to use ChatGPT.

While we are on the topic, the initial versions of the Ollama Python and JavaScript libraries are now available.

Both libraries make it possible to integrate new and existing apps with Ollama in a few lines of code and use the Ollama REST API for all your A.I. needs. It's a fun way to test out some of these LLMs.

It's About the (Data)Base 🧬

Databases can be boring to some and annoyingly exciting to others. One thing we can agree on, however, is that it's important to know how they work and how to scale them well.

With that said, distributed systems is definitely one of the most fascinating branch of computer science. Many problems in distributed systems simply do not have a clean solution, instead there are different trade-offs you can make.

So how do you scale?

Although this post is a little technical, it will teach you amazing concepts about databases and how you can use them as your data grows.

If that article goes over your head a bit, get up to speed by taking our databases course.

News Around the World 🗺

Just because I know some of you missed this from last issue, watch it because it's good:

• 2023 was a great year for computer science. Here are 2023's biggest breakthroughs

Big Tech News 🏢

• Big news out of OpenAI this month: ChatGPT store is officially live. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities and a potential new market? Time will tell. They also announced ChatGPT for teams.

• Google has done another round of job cuts. Pretty standard way to trim some of the large hiring pushes in 2020 and 2021. Other companies are following. Good thing you're a ZTM student that's not a junior.

• Disney has quietly released this pad which might change the game on VR.

• A test environment without two-factor authentication led to Microsoft’s corporate systems getting popped open.

• What is Apple's A.I. strategy? They have been awfully quiet, but my money is on them getting it right. Here is the real story of what they are working on.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Pacman in one line.

• If you want to feel real bad about how little you have accomplished in your life... Thomas Cochrane is here to make you feel worse.

• When you have too much time on your hands.

• Battle of the Pongs

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

This doesn't happen very often, so it has to be the best resource of the month... a new code editor has entered the chat: Zed.

It looks very promising and it might make me switch off of Sublime Text 4 finally (no, I haven't jumped ship to VS Code).

Ok ok, I have to add another one for this month since this article blew me away.

I highly recommend reading this to be inspired by what you can do with your technical knowledge. There is a lot of insights into problem solving skills in this one: What's that touchscreen in my room?

Trick of the Month 🎩

• This is so cool. Open Source backend for your next app in 1 file. Might be the best way for you to build your MVP for free.

• The ultimate "look like a hacker in the coffee shop" tool: Blazing fast terminal-ui for git written in rust 🦀.

• A neat way to share secrets across the web: Retriever lets you request secrets from anyone without any of the data going to a server.

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.