Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

54th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all the previous issues of my monthly Python newsletter here.

Python Developer Monthly Newsletter

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, A.I., 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 May 2024 as a Python Developer…

Reviewing Python World 🐍

Every year, it's interesting to take a look at the overall ecosystem and see what other Python enthusiasts are doing. Here is the JetBrains developer survey results from the past year for Python.

You can also check out their Django results.

Create Asyncio From Scratch 🪇

What better way to learn something than actually building it yourelf from scratch? Right now, asyncio is one of the trendier topics in Python, and rightfully so – It’s a great way to handle I/O-bound programs.

So how about you learn about it.

100x Python 🏄

A fun little trick and experiment to make Python code 100x faster: A 100x speedup with unsafe Python.

New in Python 3.13 🪩

Official docs have been released for Python v3.13! Go check out the summary to see all the new features that are being added.

My favourite fature? The brand new REPL in Python 3.13.

Scrapy vs Crawlee ⚒

The ultimate showdown in crawling and scraping. Who wins? Let's take a look at these 2 favourite tools of the trade: Scrapy vs Crawlee.

All the Tests 🧪

Learn about all the types of tests you encounter in the Python development world (I also recommend checking out the rest of the posts in this series). There are a lot more tests than you might think.

Top ChatGPT Customizations 🪞

The top suggestion in this thread is really good. Here is how to customize the GPT prompt to make it as useful as possible. Nice little 2024 life hack.

How A.I. Changes Coding 🦾

A great discussion from the programming community on how AI tools like Copilot has changed the programming world and how coding is being taught. Mixed opinions on this one, but some interesting insights and tips/tricks in here.

News Around the World 🗺

• Sure, maybe some won't consider it news, but I found this article absolutely fascinating and it will undoubtedly make you question the future of whatever you call creativity and art. Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse

• Geopolitical news: nothing happened and everyone is getting along.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Amazon has entered the Generative A.I game. Amazon Q is an AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development. They recently announced Amazon Q Developer, Amazon Q Business, and Amazon Q in QuickSight as tools similar to the ones offered by Microsoft and Google.

• Apple just announced the new M4 chip. Their strategy is clear and this hackernews user put it best: In case it is not abundantly clear by now: Apple's AI strategy is to put inference (and longer term even learning) on edge devices. This is completely coherent with their privacy-first strategy (which would be at odds with sending data up to the cloud for processing). Processing data at the edge also makes for the best possible user experience because of the complete independence of network connectivity and hence minimal latency. If (and that's a big if) they keep their APIs open to run any kind of AI workload on their chips it's a strategy that I personally really really welcome as I don't want the AI future to be centralised in the hands of a few powerful cloud providers.

• Another bit of Apple news that looks super promising/interesting because of their VR/AR play: Apple announces new accessibility features, including Eye Tracking, Music Haptics, and Vocal Shortcuts.

• OpenAI announced the big thing: GPT-4o. Aldo made a video for you explaining why this is such a big deal.

• Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Google announced Gemini Flash: a lightweight model, optimized for speed and efficiency. Google also announce Veo: a new generative video model.

We are now firmly into the ‘feeds & speeds’ phase of generative AI model deployment, with half-a-dozen players now adding multimodal, touting their AI chips (if they have them) and offering a range of models with different price performance/speed trade-offs - generally, there is the frontier model (best results), and then a large and more efficient production model, something smaller and cheaper/faster, and then whatever they can squeeze onto mobile. They all have a benchmark showing they’re in the lead, but there are no moats.

-Benedict Evans

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• What can you do with a single <div>? Apparently a lot.

• Pluck strings and play some music y'all.

• Terminal text effects that make you look like a real hacker.

• This looks promising. Anyone can now make movies with Kino

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

This one is unlike any of the previous resources I have shared in the past newsletters.

However, before you scroll away and ignore this one... trust me on this: if you are in the tech world, just by reading this article you will probably be more knowledgable about semiconductors than 99% of the population out there.

It's valuable to know how these things that run our world are made and work.

Read it, and reap the benefits (it's also just super fascinating to see how smart humans are that come up with this stuff... meanwhile I can't figure out how to center a button).

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• If this actually works, you all owe me a drink: How to get more interviews with this little trick.

• Secret Llama: Secret Llama is a free and fully private chatbot. Unlike ChatGPT, the models available here run entirely within your browser which means: 1 - Your conversation data never leaves your computer. 2 - After the model is initially downloaded, you can disconnect your WiFi. It will work offline.

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.