[March 2025] Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

Welcome to the 64th 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 March 2025 as a Python Developer…

Python 3.13 TLDR 🧛‍♂️

Here is everything you need to know about the latest version of Python. The font on this website is wild but if you get past that it's a pretty useful read.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

This weekend, learn to use Kivy. Using this guide, you will learn how to create a minimal To-do app with Kivy. The app will allow you to create new tasks, save them to an SQLite database, mark them as done, and remove them when finished.

Kivy is an open-source Python software library for developing graphical user interfaces. It supports cross-platform development for the desktop as well as the creation of multi-touch apps for mobile devices.

A Map of Python 🚏

The thing you never thought you needed but now that you have it, it's kind of interesting: A Map of Python.

How to Get help() ☎️

Python has a built-in help function for getting help... but what can you do with help?

This guide walks you through all the useful features at your fingertips.

Python Tail Calls 🪚

New Python optimization (for Python 3.14) is apparently improving performance by 10% for some python architectures. They essentially switched from using computed goto statements to using tail calls as part of the implementation of Python's bytecode interpreter.

Here are the details.

Some have said it doesn't actually boost performance as initially stated.

Want a Pickle? 🥒

Do you like pickles? What about Python pickle? It's not just a tasty snack, but also a very useful tool in Python.

Here is how to use it.

Django Got Forked 🍴

Plain has been released, and it's a fork of Django that has the community divided. It's a new web framework for building products with Python.

Check it out here.

Cursor for Coding 🦾

Here is a great writeup of an engineer that uses Cursor at their job with tips on how you can use it to boost your productivity.

There is a great discussion on hackernews around this article and what people are doing with AI coding tools.

The Science of Troubleshooting 👨‍🔬

This is a great read for a skill you will use throughout your career: Troubleshooting.

It's not just scratching your head, googling the error message, and talking to a duck.

Here is how to do it properly.

News Around the World 🗺

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest at least $100 billion more in chip-manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next several years.
Taara is spinning out of X (part of Alphabet/Google, not to be confused with X/Twitter) to become an independent company with a mission to bring high-speed, affordable and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light.
Big news in the world of copyrighted content and AI: US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

Apple announced the M3 Ultra. 512GB of unified memory is big news. Why? This is incredibly practical for running large AI models locally ("600 billion parameters"), and Apple's approach of integrating this much efficient memory on a single chip could make it the best AI laptops out there for the every day programmer.
Mistral announced the new Mistral OCR: an Optical Character Recognition API that sets a new standard in document understanding. Unlike other models, Mistral OCR comprehends each element of documents—media, text, tables, equations—with unprecedented accuracy and cognition. It takes images and PDFs as input and extracts content in an ordered interleaved text and images.
One of the biggest acquisitions ever and an indication that the cybersecurity field is a big and important field of the future. Alphabet/Google is buying Wiz for $32 billion in its biggest deal to boost cloud security. If you want to jump into this field, ZTM has a career path to get you hired in cybersecurity.
Anthropic's Claude (my favourite LLM) can now search the web.
OpenAI released an image generator with GPT‑4o that has everyone online talking. It also has audio models now and are priced quite competitively with their competitors.
Some big Chinese AI model announcements too: DeepSeek 3 is under MIT license now, and Qwen2.5-VL-32B is out. Both are worth looking at.
Musk's social media firm X bought by his AI company (xAI), valued at $33 billion. Who knows what's going on at this point.
Google had some big announcements:

Gemini 2.5 is out
Gemini Robotics. It brings AI into the physical world of robotics and combines two of the fastest growing fields right now. Here is a youtube playlist of all the things robots can do with this now.
Gemma 3: The most capable model (according to them) you can run on a single GPU or TPU.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon. Here are the beautiful pictures.
Travel through time and figure out which events you landed in. Try to beat my top score of 16,000 points on your first try.
Pop the bubble and waste time at work.
Multiplayer Minesweeper will become your new addiction. Also a great project to try and build on your own.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

A great discussion on the current state of LLMs and their potential from people that actually know what they are talking about.

This is a great thread for you to read and understand the current value of LLMs instead of reading another sensational AI blog post or another youtube video from that famous YouTuber with no experience.

Enjoy the discussion and be smarter and more informed.

Once you are done with the above, read this Career Advice for 2025 for programmers.

Finally, once you are done with those two, read this from one of the most respected software developers in the industry, Martin Fowler.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Generate impressive-looking terminal output to look busy when your boss walk by your computer. You're welcome.

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.