[May 2025] Python Monthly Newsletter 🐍

Welcome to the 66th 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 May 2025 as a Python Developer…

Free-Threaded Python 🛶

Support for free-threaded Python unlocks the full compute power of modern hardware with multicore CPUs and GPUs which are now commonplace.

The Python threading module is often not used because the GIL prevents useful parallel scaling. Instead, many reach for multiprocessing, but spawning processes is expensive and communicating across processes often requires making expensive copies of data that would not be necessary in a multithreaded program where data is implicitly shared between threads.

Confused? Read this to understand it all.

Pyrefly vs ty 🛠

The team at Meta just released Pyrefly: A new type checker and IDE experience for Python.

This will be in direct competition with the ty. Both of these are built using Rust, and both of them are still in active development.

Keep an eye out on this space.

Pip Update 🕹

Pip 25.1 introduces support for Dependency Groups (PEP 735), resumable downloads, and an installation progress bar. Check out all the changes here.

Python Web Development 💻

This is a great overview of the Web Development world for Python programmers with great architectural diagrams.

t-string Time 🪅

PEP 750 introduced t-strings for Python 3.14. In fact, they are so new that as of Python 3.14.0b1 there still isn't any documentation yet for t-strings.

As such, this blog post will hopefully help explain what exactly t-strings are and what you might use them for by unravelling the syntax and briefly talking about potential uses for t-strings.

Reinvent the Wheel 🎡

One of the most common pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel... but is this always true?

This article will make you think.

LLMs, For Senior+ Engineers 👨‍🔬

Programming with LLMs is both promising and frustrating. While these AI assistants can help with coding and debugging, they often waste time too. Yet for senior engineers, pair programming with LLMs shows real potential.

Here are the best resources to show you some current best practices.

News Around the World 🗺

• Redis is Open Source again. Redis has had a lot of drama in the last few years, and this move hopes to restore some of the community goodwill.

• Alchemists rejoice! They were right all long that you can create Gold: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC.

• World’s first personalized gene-editing treatment for a baby happened this month. The technique used on a 9½-month-old boy with a rare condition has the potential to help people with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases.

• Crypto world is doing crypto world things.

• Login and password details for Apple, Google and Meta accounts found in huge data breach of 184 million accounts. Oops.

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• Apple was found guilty for antitrust. The iPhone maker has been ordered to loosen App Store restrictions... finally.

• Anthropic had 2 big announcements with the Claude 4 release and the release of Claude Integrations. This is what they had to say about it:

Last November, we launched the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—an open standard connecting AI apps to tools and data. Until now, support for MCP was limited to Claude Desktop through local servers. Today, we're introducing Integrations, allowing Claude to work seamlessly with remote MCP servers across the web and desktop apps. Developers can build and host servers that enhance Claude’s capabilities, while users can discover and connect any number of these to Claude.

When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work—understanding project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge—and can take actions across every surface. Claude becomes a more informed collaborator, helping you execute complex projects in one place with expert assistance at every step.

• Anthropic also released web search capabilities on their API which opens a whole new world of possibilities.

• OpenAI Reaches Agreement to Buy Startup Windsurf for $3 Billion. Who know a fork of VS Code would make so much money. Incredible timeline to a $3B exit (below), but also interesting that developer tools space is heating up because AI ISN'T replacing programmers. Instead, it's making them more productive.

Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf.

Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation.

Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a $1.3 billion valuation.

May 2025: $3 billion acquisition from OpenAI

• Interestingly OpenAI also released Codex - A cloud-based software engineering agent that can work on many tasks in parallel.

• Oh and apparently OpenAI is making (funding), too much money because they also just bought Jony Ive's (famous for desinging Apple products) AI device startup for $6.5 billion.

• Google had their annual I/O event and made a couple of big announcements. Most important to you, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview is out - Expect meaningful improvements for front-end and UI development, alongside improvements in fundamental coding tasks such as transforming and editing code, and creating sophisticated agentic workflows.

• Microsoft made a shocking announcement that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. They also turned GitHub Copilot in VS Code into an Open-Source product.

• A fun little AI oopsie: Over a year after claiming that its AI chatbot could do the work of 700 representatives, Klarna is turning back to people to help with customer service work.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• This is reaaaaally cool. Explore new styles of music with Suno v4.5. All this music is AI generated, but if I didn't tell you that, would you know?

• Check out these amazing internet artifacts.

• Minecraft built with no JavaScript, just pure CSS. Wow

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

Is A.I. making us dumber? Seriously, think about it and check out the best resource of the month here.

I think there is real concern here. You will need to make a conscious decision to use AI tools to improve your productivity, but without costing your ability to reason, be creative, and develop critical thinking.

Once you watch the video above, read this: Thoughts on Thinking.

This is your warning.

P.S. I wanted to put this as the resource of the month but you all would have yelled at me: Owls in Towels

Trick of the Month 🎩

Bring back Clippy and combine it with the power of LLMs. Welcome back to the future.

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.