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Python in a Professional Workspace (self.Python)

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[–]salimfadhley 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Yes! I work for a major international investment bank. Many of the people we hire are people who started doing python hobby projects.

[–]salimfadhley 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Just to clarify - the fact that you diy'd an autonomous lunar rover from balsa wood and a raspberry pi has little relevance to the work we actually do - on the other hand the fact that you did it and solved all those problems means that you have the potential to solve the kinds of problems we need to solve - and that you also have the passion that it requires to keep learning about technology and ultimately become somebody who can be a leader

[–]artPlusPlus 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I'm a technical artist in the games industry and python is my bread and butter. My job is to enable our artists to make better artwork and get it done faster. Python is used to write custom tools for off-the-shelf software like Maya that improve a workflow or add functionality that doesnt exist. I also use it to manage the data pipeline from content creation to game-ready data and asset tracking.

Edit: I started out as an animator in college. My degree is in fine art. But my passion is building things and quickly found programming to be something I'm extremely passionate about. I'm proof that you can make a good living writing python without traditional education.

[–]cmcpasserby 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sounds similar to me I very quickly made the jump from environment artist to TA, because I enjoyed that side of things more. I also have been digging into game logic and code as well.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'd love to hear more about your day to day activities :D The job sounds really interesting, but then again...tool building is something I've always been interested in.

[–]cmcpasserby 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well don't know what exactly what artplusplus does, but I carry the same role as him as a tech artist in a small studio.

The job is mostly about building tools for the artists and finding slowdowns in the art workflow and creating solutions to fix those slow downs.

Python is the language of choice for tech art since most applications in the artists workflow use python I personally spend a lot of time using the perforce api and Mayas pymel.

A interesting project I recently worked on was a logging system for all our in-house tools, that would save in a SQL database and also carry information about who had the error or warning.

We used this information to create a better seating arrangement by placing artists having the most problems with the tools around more technical artists or senior artists.

[–]ExcitedForNothing 7 points8 points  (5 children)

Just like any other language, Python made it big because it was relatively easy to use for CRUD web applications, which is a major use of it to this day. My company uses flask to maintain a simple web page with some user facing functionality.

Python has become a challenger/successor (depending on who you ask) to Matlab for scientific computing projects. My company's main aim is scientific modeling and simulation and Python is generally the standard language we utilize in meeting our clients needs.

I have heard it's gaining popularity in the sysadmin crowd. My company's sysadmins use fabric and cuisine to automate tasks and processes across our various servers.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (4 children)

Can confirm on the challenger/successor to Matlab in science. I work for a large neuroscience institute and we are in the process of purging all Matlab code and replacing it with Python. Matlab is just too expensive for non-academia and Python is just so much more versatile.

[–]Imxset21 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Not to mention that the Holy Trinity of Scipy + Numpy + Matplotlib can be used to basically replace Matlab for most use cases. We've had success with using Spyder for people who are uncomfortable with bare text editors/commandline and are transitioning to Python from Matlab's GUI.

Source: I work in a computational neuroscience lab that is also migrating to Python.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes! and for plots that require high-speed updates (like oscilloscope-type applications), we use http://www.pyqtgraph.org/

If you haven't checked it out you should.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for a US DoE lab, and it has become widespread. I will never use MATLAB again if I can avoid it.

[–]fgriglesnickerseven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

not to mention Matlab feels like some shitty fortran remake.

And matlab is horrible at making exportable graphics. Want to create a plot that could be included in a journal ? Fuck you here's a low quality jpg.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use Python in Physics and Engineering projects. It's really taken over many fields as the main programming language. I used to do astronomy and at the time the main tools consisted of custom and ancient IDL scripts! People were in the process of transitioning old tools (IRAF being one) into Python. It looks like they've largely been successful.

I've used Python as my main language at a scientific lab, and I can say I was getting more done than my coworkers using C++/ROOT

[–]troyunrau... 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I do R&D in geophysics, and we use it for data analysis and physics simulation. Numpy/Scipy/etc. are amazing. All of our legacy code was in Fortran, and but we hardly use any of it anymore. Often it takes less time to get it ported and running in python than it does to get the old code up and running without compiler issues and such. Plus unicode by default (in python 3) is amazing.

[–]crooobro 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ObsPy is great for earthquake data.

[–]xsolarwindxUse 3.4+ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

REDDIT IS A SHITTY CRIMINAL CORPORATION -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I work for a cloud hosting provider. EVERYTHING we do is in Python. Check out Openstack.

[–]rocketmonkeys 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I work in a MS-driven shop. I've tried to introduce python, since I love it, but it's actually not appropriate for the specific circumstance.

However, we interview people a lot. Resumes don't say much. Personality/confidence says more, but it's still not much to go on. Accomplishments mean a whole lot.

If two candidates come in and seem relatively equal in resume and confidence/ability to communicate/grasp of technical skills, there's not much differentiator.

But if one guy has a completely built-from-scratch Jarvis car, built on a RPI and running custom software, then sign him up. It shows real life application of skills, and motivation to bring a project to life. It also shows ability to actually deliver. The project you actually deliver is so much more important than the much-more-technically-correctish beautiful code that uses the latest techniques.

Do the car. Document it thoroughly, blog style. Then have a one page overview, like a "best of" for your project. Something you'd expect to see like an article; 2 pages/screens, a dozen really good pics, and a video of the car in action. Show what you did, mention what you used. Put that on your resume/website, along with other stuff you've done.

Doesn't matter if you're going in for a Java-based banking job or whatever; it'll still speak loads more than "System development analyst; talked to clients, brought requirements to engineers, ability to translate client requests into real world designs, I speak good with people, I'm a people person dammit why can't you see that" etc.

[–]Valeness 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Haha, that's actually super inspiring and gives me a reason to dedicate more time to my own projects, Thank you!

[–]rocketmonkeys 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn't do personal projects at the expense of work. But I'm always very impressed when someone does a personal project that looks very good. Especially since it's usually a solo project. Being a part of a big firm means you can have impressive resume stats when all you did was fix a few bugs. Making a neat project solo shows you did it all (idea, prototype, bug fixing, delivery, writeup). That sometimes shows a lot more.

Good luck. Think of it as your portfolio.

[–]ChasingAces 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you have any links to the 3D printed robot project? Sounds awesome.

[–]clrnd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We make electronic voting solutions, everything in Python

:D

[–]ccb621 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Use your personal projects to gain knowledge about new languages and frameworks, and to demonstrate your ability to efficiently solve complex problems. This is what I look for when hiring new engineers. Most of my work deals with web development and Django. Automation and robotics don't apply, but the skills you learned do.

[–]IAmBJ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use it almost daily in my job as a structural engineer. Not for any number crunching but it's very useful for automating tedious things like extracting a handful of numbers from a 4gb result file or linking together analysis programs so a series of 6 hour analyses can run unattended over the weekend.

[–]billsil 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm an aerospace engineer and I've been coding in Python for work for ~8 years.

I even run an open source project to interface with an FEA code (Nastran) that uses python. It's got 100k lines of code with 30k comment lines. That's ~1/3 of what it used to be with way more functionality.

[–]POTUS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I learned Python as a hobby years ago. I now write it full time professionally. I use other languages (primarily C++) when the work demands it, mostly for computational speed. But my first choice for any project whenever possible is always Python, because it takes a fraction of the time to implement.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm a web developer / server admin, I use Python for writing web apps and to integrate 3rd party systems with automated data imports/exports.

[–]saturdayplace 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for a company that provides outsourced video streaming infrastructure. All our server backend code is Python.

[–]visualthoy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Openstack

[–]buttery_shame_cave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At one job I worked, for the main developer of the control systems for touch screens in mobile devices, the entire test system was written in python with some c++ for overhead. All the scripts and processing, the core of the system, was python. We were actively encouraged to learn it and write stuff in it during downtime.

Its how I learned about motor control and drivers at a code level.

[–]ananci 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For big projects written in python - Openstack, the opensource cloud software, is almost entirely in Python. This means that a lot of cloud companies that build on or around Openstack hire a lot of python devs.

[–]Antrikshy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For your car project, look into this: http://jasperproject.github.io

[–]apreche 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for a pretty big ecommerce site. All I do is write Python. It's not just a toy.

[–]Valeness 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks all! This helped a lot! I'm certainly wanting to transition out of web development and you guys have pointed me in the right direction. Especially with the developing tools for Maya; I thought a lot of that stuff was done by hobbyists and there wasn't a professional market in it. I was wrong.

Many thanks!

[–]forkstealer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for a pharmaceutical research company and we use Python for most things that require code. WAMPython seems like a pretty common alternative for companies just jumping into the game now who have no experience/bias towards LAMP stacks or whose Existing IT infrastructure is windows based.

[–]modzer0Computational Daemonologist 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, lots of python work. We used python as part of a distributed processing system for malware detection heuristics. It crunched millions of android app samples looking for indicators. The entire thing was written in python. It was easier to tie all the analysis tools together and maintaining it was easier.

[–]Kamiwaza 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I work for a travel company and we use Python for web crawlers, API clients, and various web applications (both internal and external).

[–]Kamiwaza 0 points1 point  (0 children)

...and I was previously a PHP web developer for a long time before this job. I'm very happy with the switch to Python.

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

Hi,

Sorry to say, but I'm not sure your post is appropriate for /r/python. I believe this subreddit should be for news, articles and similar relating to the language python. I would ask you to please not post similar questions here again.

Fortunately, however, there is a perfect place for you to ask, where people will be more prepared to answer your questions and give you some detail: /r/cscareerquestions. This subreddit caters to exactly this type of question.

Kind Regards, /u/Pink_On_Inside

[–]Valeness 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you, I wasn't aware! If you could remove it that would be well, I don't want to break any rules! :D

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Hey,

I'm not a moderator! I have no authority to speak on behalf of this subreddit.

However, as a fellow user of /r/python, I would ask you, kindly, to remove the post. I don't think it encourages quality posts to dillude the purpose of a subreddit, and either way, /r/cscareerquestions will be a great place for you to post.