Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

Welcome to the 56th issue of Python Monthly!

If it’s your first time here, welcome, I like you already. If you want the full back story on this monthly newsletter, head here.

The quick version: I curate and share the most important Python articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos.

Think the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the Python world. I give you the 20% that will get you 80% of the results.

If you're a long time reader, welcome back old friend.

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what you missed in July 2024 as a Python Developer…

Free-Threaded Python 🎢

You may be wondering what "free threading" or "free-threaded CPython" is, and why you should care.

In summary: it is a major change to CPython that allows running multiple threads in parallel within the same interpreter.

It is becoming available as an experimental feature in CPython 3.13. A free-threaded interpreter can run with the global interpreter lock (GIL) disabled - a capability that is finally arriving as a result of the efforts that went into PEP 703 - Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython.

Learn all about it here.

Some Advice 🧔🏼‍♂️🐍

A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago.

I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me.

This almost made the best resource of the month below.

Python Web Apps 📡

A new Python web framework has entered the chat: FastHTML.

Built on solid web foundations, not the latest fads - with FastHTML you can get started on anything from simple dashboards to scalable web applications in minutes. Looks promising.

Modern Good Practices 🔑

An excellent read on the modern good practises for Python development. Although everyone has their preferences and opinions, this article tries to give you the main practices that "most" Python enthusiasts agree are good.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

This may be the coolest project you build using Python: Bring portraits to life!

Add this to your portfolio and watch those interviewers love you.

I'm feeling generous so here is another idea: build something using a retro game engine for Python.

Python Generators ⛓

A fun little read about resource management and generators and some things that you should be careful of.

Python Oopsie with Apple 📱

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of some Python apps by Apple's app stores... the fix should be coming in Python 3.13 but it lead to some interesting discussions in the community.

The End of Internet 🦾

OpenAI recently announced their gpt-4o mini model, at a price of $0.15 per 1 million input tokens, and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens. This extremely low cost AI model has just passed an inflection point. It's now possible to build dynamic, AI generated content entirely supported by ads... is this predicting the end of the internet?

Git Everywhere ⌛️

The story of Git. How it got started to where it is now. This is a fun little read about the tool that every single developer uses. It's a fascinating story.

Is DRY Bad? 🧽

DRY – Don't Repeat Yourself. It's one of the first design principles engineers learn and we love to go wild with it... but is it actually good advice?

I agree with this article which explores this topic... it's not always black and white, and can sometimes lead to bad code.

News Around the World 🗺

• A botched update by Crowdstrike, a security vendor, crashed millions of computers. It affected big industries like banking, finance and travel, which probably caused millions (if not billions) in damages. Oops. If you want to know what happened behind the scenes technically, this video will explain it all for you.

• World's oldest cave art was found showing humans and pig. Pretty cool.

• AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach... that's about 100+ million users.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta, Google, Anthropic and Mistral all have a ‘top of line’ and ‘cheap’ models. Now OpenAI has joined, with GPT-4o Mini. The industry is consolidating around these big players, with each offering these 2 main products for different budgets.

• OpenAI also hinting that they want to work on their own AI chips (it's going to cost a lot of money).

• Meta released a paper on Meta 3D Gen: 3DGen, a new state-of-the-art, fast pipeline for text-to-3D asset generation... this is an ideal tool to use for VR and abviously Meta is interested in that market growing.

• Mistral released a new Code Generation AI tool to compete with the likes of Github Copilot and Gemini...available under an Apache 2.0 license which is nice. If you want to add this to your VS Code editor, here is how to do it.

• If you want to nerd out a bit: Intel Vs. Samsung Vs. TSMC.

• Netflix released Maestro: Data/ML Workflow Orchestrator at Netflix.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights

• Reverse Engineering TicketMaster's Rotating Barcodes.

• Want to attend a space launch in real life? It's on my bucket list and here you have a guide to attending a space launch in person.

• Solve a murder mystery using AI Chatbots. P.s. this is a great project idea you can build yourself.

• The Best Programming Language You Haven't Heard Of: It Will Surprise You!

• Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Who is hiring? Is the job market down? Is it booming? With the introduction of the AI hype, these questions seem to be asked more and more.

You can read sensationalized headlines on the web, but what does the data say?

Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" using GPT-4o & LangChain.

This is the resource of the month not only because of the interesting data, but also for showing you how to do this analysis yourself using Selenium and a bit of code.

Good news, looks like the industry is doing just fine ;).

Trick of the Month 🎩

• Find packages on PyPI with natural language queries

• Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut... yes you read that right.

• Was the above not a useful trick of the month? Fiiiine, here is a more serious one that may help you: navigate and refactor your code with ease

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 an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our courses below or see all ZTM courses here.