Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

48th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all the previous issues of my monthly Python newsletter here.

Python Developer Monthly Newsletter - November 2023

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 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 November 2023 as a Python Developer…

Python Errors 🦩

Errors happen in programs. It's important to know both where errors can happen and how to effectively handle them.

In this article you will learn how to compare the two primary ways of handling errors: thrown errors and errors as values, and demonstrate how to handle errors as values in Python.

Architecting Monorepos 🍄

Managing a massive codebase is not an easy task, yet the most influential and successful tech companies in the world seem to handle it with ease.

Take Google, for instance: back in 2015, when Google was still significantly smaller than today, it made a bold and significant move to facilitate its code management: it migrated to a Monorepo, a single repository that contains multiple projects (often with different languages and technologies).

This strategy enabled its developers to share code, tools, and resources across teams and products.

This guide will teach you how to architect your own Monorepo using GitHub Actions as a CI/CD tool, a small Python application, and Docker.

Worth checking out!

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

Have you ever wondered how debuggers work? What happens when you set a breakpoint and hit it later?

Debuggers are tools that we as developers use daily in our work, but few know how they are actually implemented.

This weekend, learn to build a debugger from scratch in Python. Weekend is for learning!

Tools in Python Land ⚒

This is a really good article to showcase all of the important environment management and packaging tools in Python.

Try your hand at reading through this guide and experimenting with all of the options out there. Once you learn the basics of each of them, you can then use them depending on your project and requirements.

It will be valuable knowledge for a long time.

Ruff Ruff 🐕

The Ruff project is a formatter that is written in Rust, and lints Python extremely fast.

This month, the Ruff formatted was released!

You can still use Ruff to lint your Python code, but now you can also use Ruff to format your code with 99.9% Black compatibility.

The good news? It’s over 30x faster than Black.

All About Lambda ✨

What are lambda expressions and lambda functions? And how are lambda functions different from other functions in Python?

Learn all about Lambda in this useful guide.

Love this stuff? Ok, here is another one: Higher Order Functions in Python.

Timestamps in Python 📅

An interesting experiment in this one. What is the fastest way to generate a timestamp in Python? Take a guess and find out.

Everything is A Hash Table 🗄

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hash Tables in Python in this ultimate guide.

ZTM 2024 Updates 🔥

If you're new here, at ZTM we have to work hard to live up to our reputation of being known for ALWAYS up to date courses (60+ now!).

So in addition to smaller updates that we're constantly making throughout the year, we also do a massive round of updates that get released around October/November each year.

Our instructors spend 1-2 months updating their courses to be 2024-ready.

If you're a ZTM student, we have already started to announce these updates in our Discord channel.

For all of November you will be able to find all of the information about the updated courses and lectures in the temporary channel #2024-updates.

ZTM students... Go check that out now! We have over 300 updated lectures/videos 🤯.

OpenAI DevDay 🌋

A lot of OpenAI news this month. The hot topic is the CEO, Sam Altman, was pushed out by the board of directors and there is a lot of speculation around why this happened...

Oh and then he got rehired and is back as if nothing happened.

However, here at ZTM, we don't care about online drama. The more interesting part was that OpenAI had their first DevDay.

If you are a dev and want to get into a very young space with high potential, you should keep an eye on this.

New models and developer products were announced at DevDay that are quite impressive. My favourite: Custom GPTs.

While we are on this topic, here is a good article on how to "build AI products".

The synopsis: don't do the easy things that everyone can copy.

News Around the World 🗺

• Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Steps Down, Pleads Guilty - Largest global crypto exchange will admit wrongdoing and agree to pay $4.3 billion in fines. Crypto doing crypto things as usual.

Big Tech News 🏢

• WeWork goes bankrupt. It was a long time coming and they join the long list of overhyped billion dollar startups that were able to market better than they were able to provide a profitable product.

• Apple Gets 36% of Google Revenue in Search Deal. This is super interesting because it used to be secret information before it got leaked this month.

• GitHub’s AI coding assistant, Copilot, has gone from an experiment to a moneymaker, the company’s CEO Thomas Dohmke said. Surprising news considering most AI products right now are losing money. OH! Guess what!? ZTM already has a course on using Github Copilot to upskill and increase your productivity...check it out here.

Speaking of Copilot...

We just launched a new masterclass style course that teaches you all about GitHub Copilot and how to use it to write code faster and more efficiently.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• A question we have all wondered... How did the jungle gym start? We've all asked that right? RIGHT?!

• Stable Video Diffusion foundation model for generative video based on the image model Stable Diffusion. Very very cool.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

"Imagine a world where every software developer is just a coder. In such a world, code might get written, but would it solve any problems?

Would the code be even useful or just an implementation of something fancy?

The difference between a developer and a great developer is the breadth and depth of their approach in delivering value."

What makes a great software developer? What are the habits of highly effective developers?

Find out here. I think Vadim provides some really good advice that all of you will enjoy.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• ChatGPT voice is a thing now, and I've heard of some people using it as a podcast to ask it questions, and listen to the answers while they learn. Cool trick!

• How to have a secure browser, and the ongoing saga with uBlock Origin plugin.

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.