Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

31st 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 June 2022 as a Python Developer…

Function Or Class? 🏗

Python's Functions are sometimes Classes. Methods are Functions inside of Classes. Confused yet?

Have a read through this to clarify things for you.

The Power Of * 👊

3*3
*args 
**kwargs

Let's learn about the power of the * in Python in - All you need to know about Asterisks in Python.

Powerful Python Feature 👺

What's a Python feature that is very powerful but not many people use or know about it? Can you guess what the top answer was?

CTX Alert! 👾

Heads up! PyPI module 'ctx' that gets downloaded over 20,000 times a week has been compromised in a software supply chain attack with malicious versions stealing the developer's environment variables.

Read about how it works here.

Decorators For Data Science 💅

Here are the useful Python decorators for Data Scientists... not much else to say about it.. go read it!

Interesting Python Tidbit 🥢

Have you ever noticed that a string with just a few characters in Python uses several dozen bytes of memory?

Why does Python seem to store strings seemingly so inefficiently?

The answer is right here.

MicroPython 🔍

MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of the Python 3 programming language that includes a small subset of the Python standard library. It's optimized to run on microcontrollers and in constrained environments. Very cool!

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

This month's project is all about security and how to handle passwords in Python!

Almost every application requires some form of authentication, password handling or use of secure credentials such as API keys.

You might not be security expert, but you should know how to deal with all these passwords and credentials securely to keep your users' credentials and data protected as well as your own API keys and various token.

Read this article and then try to implement the code on your own!

Python Developer Survey 🕺

Python Developer Survey results are out... see all the trends in the industry here.

P.s. Everyone's favourite yearly programmer survey is out as well! Check out the results here.

Rust is on its seventh year as the most loved language with 87% of developers saying they want to continue using it. We agree... Rust is pretty great.

But Python takes the top spot as the most wanted technology (tied with Rust) with TypeScript running a close second (...and yes, ZTM has a course on all of these).

Bye Bye Atom, Hello Copilot 🪂

Everyone's 6th favourite code editor is saying goodbye. Github is officially sunsetting the code editor... so you should probably just switch to the best code editor... Sublime Text ;)

Buuuuut, in better news, Github Copilot (aka really good autocompletion tool) is now generally available for everyone to use. Just convince your employer to get it for you.

News Around the World 🗺

• Hertzbleed Attack is another blow to Intel CPUs. The only prevention seems to be slowing down your processing power.

• The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta Reveals VR Headset Prototypes. Designed to Make VR ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’.

• I'm noticing a trend right now when it comes to tech hiring. A lot of companies are suspending some of their hiring. If you have a solid job right now, I recommend you consider staying put as the mobility between jobs we saw in the last couple of decades for tech workers may not keep going at the same pace

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• A Trail Tale... super cool website (the app is built with Unity WebGL wrapped in a vue.js wrapper)

• The Floppotron 3.0

• You are the top banker in charge of the central bank. Your role is to maximize economic potential by putting the right amount of money in circulation and to increase the GDP of your village: the number of apples it produces. Your only lever is to change the central bank interest rate... Good luck!

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

This month's best resource comes from a StackOverflow discussion and a discussion that has been going on since the beginning of software engineering.

For any programmer who takes themselves seriously, this is a must read. Trust me.

Once you are done with that (ha! got you with 2 resources this month!), read this so you don't go dumb dumb: The Grug Brained Developer - A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Have pets inside your VS Code.

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.