Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

47th issue! If you missed the previous ones, you can read all the previous issues of my monthly Python newsletter here.

Python Developer Monthly Newsletter - October 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 October 2023 as a Python Developer…

Python 3.12 is Out 💡

The biggest party every year in the Python ecosystem. Grab your mechanical keyboard, dim the LED lights, and lean that expensive gaming chair back while loading this on your 5 monitors: Python 3.12 is here!

Don't worry, my Python Bootcamp course and our other Python related courses are already up to date with this version of Python 😉.

I also recommend you read this article that showcases some of the less talked about features added in 3.12 (I've already mentioned the main ones in the previous issues of this newsletter).

Finally, for all those performance freaks out there, here is the comparison between 3.11 and 3.12.

Python 3.13 Alpha 🕺

As if Python 3.12 wasn't exiting enough, the next version, 3.13, is already in alpha stages.

For you eager beavers, you can test it out here.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

This weekend, your challenge is to build an API with FastAPI.

*Picture middleware as your API’s secret agent, effortlessly intercepting incoming requests before they are processed and outgoing responses before returning them.

It’s like having a personal assistant that adds custom functionality to your request-response cycle without disrupting the core framework. While FastAPI provides built-in middleware options, the true power lies in creating custom middleware tailored to your needs.*

Trust me. It's a cool exercise to get you comfortable building APIs.

Or do you want to use Flask and build a full stack app using Stripe payments and VueJS? Here is another option for you.

Pick one and build something cool!

CLI Tools With Python 📟

A super interesting article from an experienced python programmer: Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python.

You're not going to want to miss this one.

Functool Funk 🎷

6 Cool Things You Can Do With The Functools Module.

This is my favourite one:

from functools import cache

@cache
def fibonacci(n: int) -> int:
    if n <= 1:
        return n
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)

for i in range(40):
    print(fibonacci(i))

Non-GIL Python Update 🥁

Back at the end of July, the Python steering council announced its intention to approve the proposal to make the global interpreter lock (GIL) optional over the next few Python releases.

The details of that acceptance are still being decided on, but work on the feature is proceeding—in discussion form at least. Beyond that, though, there are efforts underway to solve that hardest of problems in computer science, naming, for the no-GIL version.

More details here.

Advice For You 🎎

Advice to people studying technology:

• Never just follow hype or trends.
• Be curious. Don't just learn tools, try to understand how the underlying technology works.
• If possible, try at least once to manually do what e.g. a configuration tool does for you.
• If possible, try to look at the code for the tool. Even a basic understanding of the code can be very valuable.
• Stay curious. Keep learning. Experiment. Dive deeper into the technology that interests you. If possible, set up a homelab and use it as a playground for learning and breaking things.
• Question everything. Especially things that don't make any sense to you.
• Don't just assume that someone else knows better - that's how you quickly turn into a blind follower. Sometimes someone else truly knows better, but don't just assume that to be the case by default. And be brave! Stand by the truth and your convictions even if that makes you feel like you stand alone.

I recommend you read the whole article that inspired this: We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak

ZTM 2024 Updates 🔥

If you're new here, at ZTM we want to be 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 and for all of November you will be able to find all of the updated information about the courses and lectures in the temporary channel #2024-updates.

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

CTO Handbook 📘

A nice little resource for you to bookmark: The Stratup CTO Handbook - Essential Skills And Best Practices For High Performing Engineering Teams.

If you like this kind of stuff, here is another one: Lessons learned from 2 decades of being a Site Reliability Engineer.

News Around the World 🗺

• 23andMe had a data leak... there goes your DNA information to the world.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Remember the Unity debacle in last month's newsletter where greedy choices by the company made every single developer hate Unity? After that bad decision, the CEO has stepped down.

• AI Hype is still around, but it's starting to settle. Turns out, Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits... Microsoft, Google and others are experimenting with how to produce, market and charge for new tools and they are struggling so far.

• Related to the point above, ChatGPT’s consumer business has been growing more slowly than you might have thought

• Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a personal computer. If you want some context on the history of Apple CPU Architecture and learn how CPUs work, this is a great read.

• Technically not news about a big tech company, but a company that is taking on the big tech and where they are the most profitable: the Cloud. Oxide seems to be a really cool company. As one user states:

*They sell servers, but as a finished product. Not as a cobbled together mess of third party stuff where the vendor keeps shrugging if there is an integration problem. They integrated it.

It comes with all the features they expect you to want if you wanted to build your own cloud. Also, they wrote the software. And it's all open source.

So no "sorry but the third party vendor dropped support for the bios". You get the source code. Even if Oxide goes bust, you can still salvage things in a pinch.* Keep an eye out on them.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Where does your computer get the time from? A simple sounding problem turns out to be not that simple.

• A 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire. So pretty.

• Animated AI

• How to approach unconventional problems? Creative thinking is key.

• You think you had a bad day?

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

My favourite types of articles and resources are architecture ones.

Why?

Because architecture is such a fluid topic that is never black and white.

Every problem needs a specific architecture, that might be good or bad depending on the business needs.

More than anything in tech, architectural decisions are almost never the same accross products, and in order to do it right, someone with a lot of experience and knowledge needs to implement it while considering an unimaginable number of factors.

So when this article came up this month, I couldn't NOT give it the Best Resource of the Month award.

Although it simplifies some things, I guarantee you that anyone that reads this article will learn something and become a better programmer for it.

Enjoy it: Deep dive into the problems video streaming sites face and how they can architect their infrastructure to manage the load.

Trick of the Month 🎩

• This blew my mind. It's still in beta, but worth checking out...Build browser agents for real world tasks.

• A free and open source map of the word that you can use in your projects: Protomaps

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.