Who buys all the Pi's?

Author

Ian Wootten
November 07, 2021

Did you know that October is apparently 'Techtober'? A time when large tech companies release their expensive new products....No, I didn't either. Nevertheless, October marked two exciting events in my calendar which this months edition of the newsletter will be looking at.

Firstly, there was the official release of Python 3.10 and with it the arrival much hyped structural pattern matching. Check out this issues links for reasons why you may want to hold off upgrading though.

I've been running a bunch of benchmarks using the Python performance benchmark suite on my M1 mac with 3.10 to see if there were any major speed improvements - short answer, there wasn't!

The second event was the unexpected release of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W - an upgraded version of the older Zero. It features a newer Quad core CPU roughly equivalent to a RPi 3. I've been a massive fan of everything the Raspberry Pi foundation release since they first started shipping hardware back in 2012 so had to pick one up of course. I think I have just about every variation of their machines - so it's just as well most of them are tiny. I will be putting it to good use soon upgrading my ad blocker PiHole that sits on my internal network.

Hope you enjoy this issues links - as always, if you have any comments on them or content suggestions for the future, let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian

Python developer in residence Łukasz Langa looks through python/cpython Github PR data to find out what contributors are working on and which libraries require the most work.

Trey Hunner details all that changed in Python 3.10 and what that means for you.

Python 3.10 might be available now but as any developer on a team larger will know, it may be a while before it's supported by libraries you're dependent on. So when should you start using it?

The Raspberry Pi foundation details how they're being affected by the global chip shortage, re-introducing the 2GB RAM version of the RPi 4.

The RP2040 chip first unveiled when the the Raspberry Pi Pico was launched earlier this year makes an appearance on this novel gameboy style keychain.

I've always wanted a "pro" version of the Raspberry Pi 400 that used a less plastic-y keyboard. So I was really interested to see this mechanical keyboard upgrade recently.

Other Things

Originally an April fools joke - the copy and paste keyboard is now available for purchase. More for show than anything else.

Tauri is a Rust based framework that builds binaries for all major desktop platforms. Builds with Tauri are supposedly much smaller and faster than with Electron.

Stripe have released a set of tools to quickly design checkout flows with pre built components. Perfect for backend devs like me :)

A Favourite Tweet

Yay - The new RPi Zero 2 W has arrived. From release day to delivered to me in 25 hours! Very impressive @ThePiHut pic.twitter.com/ij0rc4rxeE— Ian Wootten (@iwootten) October 29, 2021