4 Text Similarity Tools, 5 simple guidelines for writing recursive functions and more
with some more interesting news, articles, packages and projects
News
Preventing ZIP parser confusion attacks on Python package installers
Python 3.14.0rc2 released
The next pre-release of Python 3.14 will be the final release candidate, 3.14.0rc3, scheduled for 2025-09-16; the official release of 3.14.0 is scheduled for Tuesday, 2025-10-07
Python 3.13.7 released
This is the seventh maintenance release of Python 3.13
Nominees for 2025 PSF Board Election Announced
The last supported Python version for Pytype will be 3.12
PyData Seattle CFP is open
[Accepted] PEP 728 – TypedDict with Typed Extra Items
[Final] PEP 750 – Template Strings
[Final] PEP 792 – Project status markers in the simple index
PyPI now checks for expired domains to prevent domain resurrection attacks
Articles
The Recursive Leap of Faith, Explained
Al Sweigart wrote an amazing article on writing recursive functions, breaking it down into five simple guidelines. If recursion feels tricky, his approach makes it much easier to understand and apply in real-world problems.
# Al Sweigart
4 Text Similarity Tools: When Regex Isn't Enough
Khuyen Tran wrote a nice article on text similarity in Python. She covered multiple approaches: Regex, difflib, RapidFuzz, and Sentence Transformers. She shared examples for each and explained when to use which approach.
# Khuyen Tran
Checking for string prefixes and suffixes in Python
Two often-overlooked Python string methods are startswith() and removeprefix(). Trey Hunner covered them with nice examples. Remembering these can help you write cleaner and more readable code.
# Trey Hunner
The Python package ecosystem is huge and sometimes it’s tough to discover the right tools when you need them. That’s why it’s always a good idea to stay updated on useful packages. In this video, Arjan Egges covered 15 powerful but often overlooked packages that can help you write cleaner code and boost performance, with practical real-world examples.
# Arjan Egges
Exciting 40+ Projects on Deep Learning to Enhance Your Portfolio in 2025
Many freshers often end up building the same set of projects, which doesn’t always help them stand out. If you’re a fresher and want to try something different to test and showcase your skills, check out this article by Kechit Goyal. He shared 40+ project ideas that can help you learn, practice and build a stronger portfolio.
# Kechit Goyal
Interesting Packages and Projects to Explore
FinanceToolkit - Transparent and Efficient Financial Analysis
xonsh - Python-powered shell. Full-featured and cross-platform
Cappa - Declarative CLI argument parser
Awesome Public Datasets - A topic-centric list of HQ open datasets
yt-dlp - A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
Recent Noteworthy Package Releases
fastapi-pagination 0.14.0 - FastAPI pagination
compressed-tensors 0.11.0 - Library for utilization of compressed safetensors of neural network models
browser-use 0.6.0 - Make websites accessible for AI agents
mlflow 3.3.0 - MLflow is an open source platform for the complete machine learning lifecycle
langfuse 3.100.0 - A client library for accessing langfuse
diffusers 0.35.0 - State-of-the-art diffusion in PyTorch and JAX
ntc-templates 8.0.0 - TextFSM Templates for Network Devices, and Python wrapper for TextFSM's CliTable
zstandard 0.24.0 - Zstandard bindings for Python
pint 0.25.0 - Physical quantities module
dspy 3.0.0 - The framework for programming—not prompting—language models
markdown-it-py 4.0.0 - Markdown parser, done right. 100% CommonMark support, extensions, syntax plugins & high speed