Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

23rd 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 October 2021 as a Python Developer…

Python 3.10 Stream 👾

Do you love Python? Do you also love online zoom calls with people wearing wacky hats? Then you're going to love this: Python 3.10 was released on October 4th, 2021. You can now watch the live release stream with Pablo Galindo, CPython Core Developer and Python 3.10 Release Manager, and Leon Sandøy.

Ps. here is an interesting article of what the core team does... mostly.

But Before You Switch to 3.10 🚫

So Python 3.10 is now available. But should you switch to it immediately? And if not now, when? The short answer is, no, you probably don’t want to switch immediately; quite possibly you can’t switch immediately. To understand why, we need to consider Python packaging, the software development process, and take a look at the history of past releases. Read the full article here.

But let's be honest. We all love new shiny things. So what's so great about 3.10?

Let's Talk About The GIL 🛠

The GIL was a big topic of discussion this month. The GIL stands for the Global Interpreter Lock, and its job is to make the CPython interpreter thread-safe. If you don't have any idea what any of that means, here is a deep dive.

Is the GIL standing in the way of Python having proper concurrency? "Given that the vast majority of Python programs are single-threaded (and likely to remain so), it is not surprising that there has never been much appetite for solutions that impose this sort of cost." Read this proposal to remove the GIL. If your head hurts from reading this, I recommend the TL;DR version here.

Django 4.0 Things 🙌

Django 4.0 is out and about and there are some notable changes. Check out the beta version here.

An interesting change is the new testing feature. Read about it here.

News Around the World 🗺

• Biggest shocker of the month (sarcasm): Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

Big Tech News 🏢

• The entirety of Twitch has been leaked... including source code and user payout data. All in a 128gb torrent. Not a good month for Twitch.

• Apple came out with new laptops... but the big news is the Apple built CPUs: M1 Pro or M1 Max chips that blow any competition out of the water. Insane results at the always expected high prices. Apple is doing well.

• Facebook is turning into Meta ✌️

• Google has an anti-trust lawsuit on its way. Remember how we all said AMP is the worst? Here is part of the lawsuit: 249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. UGh. Here is a twitter thread of all the bad things they are doing.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• The very first artwork made in space... a great story too.

• We live in a beautiful world. Moths in slow motion.

• This is probably the coolest project I have EVER seen.

• Programmers, get your brain turned into mush.

• The impossible camera shot.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

This is a good one....

You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context.

“You just need to charge more!” says the company who has been in business for 20 years and spent years charging “too little” to gain customers and become successful.

“You need to build everything as microservices!” says the company who built a quick monolith, gained thousands of customers, and then pivoted into microservices as they started running into scaling issues.

Without understanding the context, the advice is meaningless, or even worse, harmful. If those folks had followed their own advice early on, they themselves would likely have suffered from it. It is hard to escape this trap. We may be the culmination of our experiences, but we view them through the lens of the present.

Keep reading my favourite article of the month: 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• Motion Design Editor for the Web... or you know just take our motion design course with Figma.

• Favicon.js to make all the coolest favicon notifications

• Love cricket? Well, then: fake VS Code to browse live cricket score in office

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.