Python Monthly Newsletter 💻🐍

Welcome to the 59th 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 October 2024 as a Python Developer…

Python 3.13 When? 🎊

I personally never upgrade a library, or a piece of software right when it comes out (unless it's a minor bug fix upgrade). Why?

Because software is usually never 100% the first time it comes out. With that in mind, when should you update to the latest version of Python, 3.13?

Here is the answer.

Debugging Python 🩻

Here is a great tutorial on how to use pdb and breakpoints to debug your Python code. Python has the Python Debugger that is part of the standard library, and it is the recommended way to debug.

Django Ideas 💡

A lot of you reading this newsletter use or have heard of Django, so with that in mind, here are some Django project ideas for you.

JetBrains has compiled a list of Django project ideas that will help you expand your competence, whether you’re new to the framework or looking to advance your existing skills.

Weekend Project Idea 🧰

With the release of Python 3.13, you should take a look at the biggest changes coming to Python: Free-threaded Python from PEP-703.

In order to learn about this new feature, use this weekend to learn about it using this guide. Enjoy!

Do AI Companies Work? 🤖

There is no doubt there is a flood of AI tools out right now... but does AI work? This is a good thought experiment.

"In this market, timing may be everything: At some point, the hype will die down, and people won’t be able to raise these sorts of rounds. And the winners won’t be who ran the fastest or reached some finish line, but whoever was leading when the market decided the race is over."

GPU Bubble is Bursting 🎈

This is a fascinating read that I recommend everyone check out. It was almost the Best Resource of the Month. Last year, H100s were $8/hr if you could get them. Today, there's 7 different resale markets selling them under $2. What happened?

Here is how the GPU market burst and what the effects will be for the entire AI market.

Valuable warnings in this article.

15 Year Old is Better than You 👀

A 15 year old discovered a bug that affected over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Here is their story. Try not to feel bad about how much better this teenager is than you.

News Around the World 🗺

• This is an incredible historical event for humanity, and it's straight out of a sci-fi movie. Watch Starship's Fifth flight test and successful capture of its rocket. Absolutely wild.

• The Internet Archive was under attack this month, with a breach revealing info for 31 million accounts. An account on X called SN_Blackmeta said it was behind the attack... did not expect a place like Internet Archive to ever get targeted.

Big Tech News 🏢

• Meta released Meta Movie Gen - a new way to generate AI videos, and it's looking impressive. Meta is getting a lot of goodwill from the engineering community these days with all of their open source releases in the AI field.

• A lot of Anti Trust cases coming out lately in big tech. US antitrust case against Amazon is set to move forward.

• Google's NotebookML made a lot of splash last month (if you didn't hear about it, maybe you should be reading this newsletter every month you slacker). Now, you can guide NotebookLM's Audio Overview, guiding what the AI hosts focus on and their expertise level, and apply for the NotebookLM Business pilot program... keep an eye on this space.

• Anthropic is making a lot of waves in the AI tooling world. Their latest? Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and a new model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across-the-board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding—an area where it already led the field. Claude 3.5 Haiku matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, our prior largest model, on many evaluations for the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku. The computer use demo is crazy impressive.

• Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro with M4 chip, and new iMac with M4, supercharged by Apple Intelligence and available in fresh colors... uh la la, pretty.

• OpenAI is building its own chips with Broadcom and TSMC wile it scales back foundry ambition. Remember how Sam Altman at one point wanted to build their own foundry with a $7 trillion investment? They also released ChatGPT Search: Get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources.

• Microsoft’s GitHub has agreed to bake artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and Google into Github Copilot. At first, customers will be able to use Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet to chat and ask questions and eventually, the models will be incorporated into the main part of the GitHub Copilot assistant.

• This is important so take note: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI. Industry is changing whether you like it or not. If you want to stay current and up to date then...

Shameless plug time...

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Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• Euclid is creating an atlas of the cosmos. Here are its first images that will make you feel very very small.

• PHP server with electron client to create...C ounter Strike: Here is the code.

• A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years.

Best Resource of the Month 🥽

First read this article, and then read an insightful comment and life lesson from hackernews user seanhunter... the lesson will last you a lifetime:

One of the most valuable life lessons is you can't get anyone else to care about what you want them to care about basically ever. You need to focus on the things you can control and one of the things you can't control is what someone else is going to care about.

So if you want something done and someone else has to agree, you have to figure out how the thing you want coincides somehow with their interests and concerns. Then you explain the thing you want to them in terms of how it advances/affects the interests and concerns of the other person.

So in the framing of TFA, product are never ever ever under any circumstances going to give a shit about your architecture proposal (because that is entirely in the domain of your concerns). But they may care about how the architecture is going to prevent them from delivering features that are on the roadmap coming up and how you have a solution that can fix that for example (because now you are in the domain of their concerns).

Notice this is not just "your architecture proposal", it is how your architecture proposal is going to get them what they want, and if you want to do this you need to think deeply and make sure you really understand what they want, not just what you want.

You're not trying to change their mind. You're trying to get what you want by showing them how it will also get them something they want.

I'm putting this here because I really wish someone had told me this 25 years ago near the start of my career.

Trick of the Month 🎩

Are you super into code performance?

Then use Scalene: a high-performance, high-precision CPU, GPU, and memory profiler for Python with AI-powered optimization proposals.

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.