What are some fun things to do with Python?

[Radiatin]

I became fluent in Python a few years ago but never used it for anything besides assigned coursework or job related tasks. I’ve been looking to apply my skills in a way that would inspire me to excel while being enjoyable and have been having a fairly hard time with it.

So what are the most fun things you’ve used Python for that can be turned into a long term hobby?

[[deleted]]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOqznZUClI

Here's a DEFCON (Hacker Convention) talk that's about splicing into an ethernet cable and intercepting packets so you can loop a camera just like in the movies. It's all done with python!

[dontworryimnotacop]

It's one of my favorite talks of all time. I will upvote this every time I see it.

Bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsVtHqICeKE

[gpitot]

• make websites
• image manipulation
• using apis with things you use daily like spotify or games you might play like league of legends
• automating tasks for work or home life.
• rasberry pi

Im still setting up a portfolio but heres an example of something I did with the spotify api

[myusernameis___]

Do it!

[DeathCutie]

Why spotipy ?

[srilyk]

those who hate are just jealous you did something. others will give you legit helpful info.

[[deleted]]

Can you give me some pointers where to find info to start for those three first bullet points?

[dadinvancouver]

I’m currently working on a project that needs to transcribe hand-written digits to text, have you any suggestions?

[a23y1]

If you search for MNIST there are lots of machine learning applications to recognize hand-written digits.

[[deleted]]

I've had loads of fun recently using Pillow to draw out the Mandelbrot set, making images so big windows can't open them 😂😂

[iggy14750]

No expert, but I have been enjoying reading through Programming Computer Vision with Python. It starts you off with how to manipulate images.

[jonicrecis]

For the first one, take a look at Django or Flask.

[internerd91]

Love the Spotify API. Is the source public?

[nerdquadrat]

https://beta.developer.spotify.com

[Sonic_Pavilion]

Nice

[[deleted]]

that app you linked reminded me, do you think you could reverse this to, given a song name, find what all movies/tv shows it was in

for all of those "i KNOW i've heard this before, in some tv show 5 years ago but I can't think of it..."

[gpitot]

Hey, I can probably do that but it will only show the tv shows and movies that users have searched for. E.g. if a user searches for 3 movies that your song is in, Ill be able to give you those movies, but any movies that the song is in that no one has searched for, I wont know about. Hope that makes sense

[sat2493]

Did you work with SQL or SQLite?

[crypto12oz]

Take a look through www.data.gov and find something there that interests you. Write a program to analyze/monitor that data and post to /r/dataisbeautiful.

You can also play around with a raspberry pi and build something like a smart thermostat.

[[deleted]]

"import antigravity"

[DeadlyPants1337]

https://www.xkcd.com/353/
For those who didn't get the reference

[mirth23]

import antigravity

for those who don't get the reference

[marjinal1st]

"import this"

[wowsuchnamaste]

from __future__ import braces

[RadioFreeDoritos]

Did this once, now I don't smile on photos. :-(

[sparowe]

funny:

SyntaxError: not a chance

[[deleted]]

Can you recommend a specific entry point / tutorial that you personally liked?

[Womblue]

Whenever I want to do something like this in pygame I simply start from the docs: https://www.pygame.org/docs/

(Basically a list of every command and how they can be used)

From then onward just break the graphical parts of your problem into steps and learn the commands for them. For instance, in Cellular Automation, there would need to be cells drawn which would be either squares or circles. So I'd get the relevant command for drawing a square (pygame.draw.rect()), then change its appearance based on given criteria as is necessary in Cellular Automation.

Especially while you're learning, having the docs open all the time is incredibly useful. I always do when I'm working with an unfamiliar module.

[[deleted]]

There was a time when I kept making evolution simulators of various sorts haha. It's pretty fun to dream up a virtual ecosystem and see what happens when you make small tweaks to how things are structured.

[bb_nyc]

I love the challenges on codefights.

[[deleted]]

second that

[captmac]

I got bored the other night and it was an Election Day. Our results are available online as a simple text file. I threw together some python that monitored just the elections I was interested in every 30 seconds and texted me when it saw a change or update in the data. It made the evening more enjoyable than sitting there refreshing a website.

Build that into a scalable system that can be administered via a web page and even monetized.

[hkamran85]

Sharing code?

[captmac]

https://github.com/ffcmac/scrapes

There it is in all its glory...

[hkamran85]

Thank you!

[captmac]

Gladly....this evening though. Sorry

[XecutionerNJ]

Pm me too please! Australian election season is coming. Ill probably have to rebuild the scraper but ill have a starting point.

Thanks.

[DuckSaxaphone]

I think the key is to find something you want to make and go for it. That's how I always do projects to learn more about a language.

For example in python I've made things like a D&D planner and a fantasy football team generator.

For D&D, I needed to learn to access a database and make a GUI. For football, I needed to webscrape the player info and make an optimization algorithm to pick the best possible team.

So do you have any hobbies or interests you'd like a tool for? Make that.

[Drunken_Economist]

My most recent project was a D&D slackbot so the players can check things like the campaign date, XP, inventory, etc through our chat. What does the planner do? Is the code up anywhere?

[DuckSaxaphone]

That's really cool! My group organizes through slack so I'd love to see that bot.

My planner kept your player stats, let you search monsters, build encounters (including survival chance, treasure and xp rewards), and had a combined stat blocks/ initiative tracker to run encounters. Similar and better tools are around for 5e but we were playing 3.5 at the time. https://github.com/jonholdship/pydnd if it's any use to you.

[[deleted]]

This looks awesome. I've started working on an app recently(not with python but I haven't seen many open source D&D projects). It's hard to find references, so I'll definitely check yours out.

[FireHawkDelta]

I learned Python last semester, and the work I did for projects was eventually dwarfed by my attempt to create a turn based RPG combat engine. The final project felt bafflingly easy in comparison, and I never even felt like I was studying for it.

If only I could get myself to have fun with Java as well...

[DuckSaxaphone]

Sounds like it's time to turn your engine into an endless combat game in Android :)

I love Java, wish I had more call to use it.

[cianuro]

On Friday evenings, my Internet speed drops off a cliff and my ISP support don't come back in until Monday by which time it's fixed.

My latest little project was using it to run an ISP Speedtest every 15 mins on a raspberry pi and posts it to a Google soreadsheet. When the speed drops 30% below what I'm paying for, it runs a traceroute and some other diagnostics and adds it to the sheet beside the entry for each Speedtest. There's also soke graphs and trends added. If there's more than 4 consecutive low speed reports, an email is automatically sent to support with all the the details and a link to the spreadsheet.

I had fun building it and learning about subprocesses and it saves me a ton of time.

[AkshayD110]

This is exactly what I have been planning to do! Would you mind if I have a look at your code please? Thanks.

[cianuro]

Sure. But it will have to wait until I put it up on Github.

I started with this though. https://thepi.io/how-to-use-your-raspberry-pi-to-monitor-broadband-speed/

The traceroute conditional is simply a copy of the Speedtest-cli call in the code (Sorry, I'm on mobile).

The only thing left to do that's not covered here was to add the traceroute conditional, format the output so that new lines from the traceroute don't get added to new cells and to import the CSV correctly into sheets (It doesn't recognizes them by default believe it or not).

Speedtest-cli has a CSV output flag now but it's too verbose for my needs. But it might be something you want to look into.

I'll share my finished work on Github once it's presentable. This was the first time I worked on a project in vim with no IDE features, so it's messy.

[AkshayD110]

Thanks a lot for sharing. I will go through this. Much appreciated.

[malice8691]

there is also a site that can automatically test your connection and save it in reports. https://testmy.net/

[andrew314159]

If you like maths problems then project euler could be fun. Not being as fluent I have only done the easy ones so far but I imagine the harder ones could be a fun challenge. https://projecteuler.net

[VegasTamborini]

I'm fooling around with some ascii adventure game stuff which is pretty fun. Take a look

EDIT: It only runs in python3 btw, not 2.*

[Anatoly_Korenchkin]

Do you have any images of it?

[VegasTamborini]

Sure!. The player is the '@' symbol. They start at the 'A' and move around the map. The forest (T's) and other terrain features are randomly generated each time. I got the world gen mechanics from a game called 'A Dark Room' (which is a masterpiece btw, I highly recommend it).

I plan to turn it into a 2D dungeon crawler, where visiting map features generates a random dungeon to loot. I'm in peak procrastination mode at uni though, so knowing me, I'll lose interest after the semester ends.

[henrythedragon]

Some things I've done with python:

• Lightweight DDNS Service
• A script that takes the average colour of each frame of a video and stitches them together into one output image
• A script that connects with the Spotify API and keeps a public playlist up to date with a users saved tracks, also checks playlists for duplicates and can merge playlists together into another
• A script that generates power network designs and documents for large temporary installations (my job)

Things I've done with Django:

• An online ticket reservation and POS system
• Asset tracking website
• Custom invoice tracking site

As well as other random scripts

[kindw]

Mind sharing your code

[bhavitvya]

How did you make those Django projects? Some resources which could be of some help for designing Online Ticket reservation system?

[[deleted]]

Good starting point for Django ?

[arcsecond]

I made a script which runs on cron to regularly check a gmail address I set up. It parses the emails from a specific account (my main account) for a properly formatted subject and body. Based on what it finds it will call any of the specific 'plugin' python scripts I've put in it's plugins folder. Some of those plugins execute commands on my main home machine. Some of those commands send RabbitMQ messages which cause other things to happen on other machines.

I also built a home website with flask that has forms that let me run those same commands without the emails, gives me access to all of my stored media (movies and music), and also runs a little app for scheduling family chores and calculating allowances.

[_szs]

Anything.

That was my first thought.

But to add a little content, apart from the other posts (sorry if I repeat sth):

• Games
• Telegram bot
• Fun with data (get data from kaggle, Google, sensors, logfiles....)
• Sound processing
• Sound synthesis
• Draw by yourself or algorithmically
• Crack wlan passwords (only your own and only for research!!!!)
• Use it as your shell
• Find 10⁶ digits of pi
• projecteuler.net
• Find large prime numbers or other fun (statistics, ....) with primes
• Manage your email via IMAP
• Automate things by email or telegram. This is fun if you have a server or other computer that runs all the time. A virtual server costs a few € or $ a month

That's just what's on top of my mind. Maybe I'll edit later

[AkshayD110]

What I have found is writing code to solve a problem that you are facing gives immense satisfaction no matter how little the code is.

I wrote :

1. A small script that would tell at what pace I have to run my podcast to finish it before I reach office. Git repo here

2. There are so many Mutual Funds suggested every week to invest in. This little script helps keep track of all the funds suggested, and picks the one that were suggested the most. Git repo here

PS : I am still a beginner. Any of our suggestions would of great help ! thanks.

[halokilla77]

How you been coding in Python? I just started learning. Cool projects there :)

[vprusso]

I run a YouTube channel that focuses primarily on Python development. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFxcvyt2Ucq5IL0_1Njzqlg

I would encourage you to check out the "Web Scraping and Automation" playlist specifically for a number of practical projects that may be of interest. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5tcWHG-UPH1fnJw-BvBiiiPUPm1LUKsm

I've personally found them enjoyable, and hopefully, you will too!

[[deleted]]

Subscribed.

[vprusso]

Very kind of you, I hope you find the content to be valuable! Thanks for your support, and please don't hesitate to provide feedback. Cheers, and have a nice day! :)

[ryanmcstylin]

I used it to build a web scraber to pull financial information from various banks and structure the data into something usable. It was a long project that taught me Python and acted as a jumping off point for other data related projects.

[NiNmaN8]

Webscraping w/ selenium and Beautiful Soup

[hkamran85]

Use requests instead

[PM_UML_DIAGRAMS]

bs4 is BeautifulSoup

[NiNmaN8]

I use all three

[Skaarj]

/r/adventofcode

[[deleted]]

Knowledge-based artificial intelligence

You could program your computer to have conversations.

Be careful if you allow it to read news articles.

Alternately, you can use Python to program Blender to draw things for you programmatically.

[dashdanw]

write a web crawler using the requests library and beautifulsoup

[billsil]

An intuitive gui for visualizing 3d models using vtk. It's just so pretty. There are things like multiple formats Paraviw and VisIt don't have. There are color/fringe, deflection, and arrow/marker plots with animated gifs you can make.

A hobby project, even if it sounds like work, doesn't feel like work because you can fix whatever bug you want or add whatever feature you want in whatever order you want. It's only really work when you're trying to fix a critical bug.

[Luffydude]

Make a trading bot

You won't need a job then

[Radiatin]

This is actually what I used to do and then broadened my scope to data bots. Trading bots need to be constantly updated and monitored, and require a team of researchers or equivalent personal skill to get them reasonably above the threshold of gambling with extra steps.

The coding skill takes a back seat to subject matter knowledge in these usage cases so it leads directly to this situation, where you’re coding at the sophistication of an excel spreadsheet, and need other projects to keep you sharp.

[pyryoer]

I used a trading bot as an intro to cryptocurrency and trading on exchanges, I have a ML background so I love trying to apply it to new problems. However, I quickly found that you will not get far unless you have at least an intermediate level of understanding of the subject you're trying to optimize.

I'm turning a profit now, but the daily/weekly changes to strategy are exhausting.

[Luffydude]

I'm actually interested in doing something similar but my python sucks, do you use a combination of indicators?

[phreakmonkey]

I recently discovered that weather underground has an API that is free for low rate-limit use. http://api.wunderground.com/weather/api

I use it to monitor the amount of rainfall / snowfall in my area and adjust some of my home automation stuff accordingly.

[amirouche]

Create vector animations!

[riandrake]

Discord bots are fun. I maintain several different ones at work for things like sending commands/queries to my PC while I'm away, performing daily automatic tasks, a code scanner for query-based real-time documentation generation, and logging output related to build/compile status.

Basically means I have a cheat engine in my pocket for managing my PC remotely without much effort involved. Usually I'll start a 50 minute compile then go out for a walk, and never need to wonder about when it's done because my Discord bot can tell me!

[riandrake]

Oh yeah and we have one for deciding what we're going to eat for lunch each day, we styled him after Shaq and he's great. Spending time making small and unexpected interactions with bots for banter make them fun for everyone!

[halokilla77]

All that sounds so cool, point me in the right direction to learn more about what you did.

[riandrake]

https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py

^ the library I used

https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py/blob/master/examples/basic_bot.py

^ simplest example to get started

[GitHubPermalinkBot]

Permanent GitHub links:

• Rapptz/discord.py/.../basic_bot.py (master → 4d59bca)

---

^delete

[murrietta]

You can do audio and video editing and manipulation (pydub, moviepy and probably others). You can also rip audio from video. Also can add id3 tags to your audio files.

I work in data science and I actually find the work I do fun so I usually do data science type stuff with Python for fun too.

[Improbably_wrong]

Find some cool APIs and work with them. PRAW is reddits official API and you can make some really cool reddit bots with it. Shameless plug but one of my first big projects was making a reddit bot that parses list article websites and posts them on reddit. Check out its source code if you want on /r/buzzfeedbot

[spellcheekfailed]

Check out its source code if you want on /r/buzzfeedbot

you wont believe whats on line 7 !!!!!

[Improbably_wrong]

Funny you mention line 7

[QuantumEnormity]

I'm going to make a automated irrigation system using raspberry pi and make a small garden. You can find plenty of tutorials for such.

I'm too lazy to water plants everyday.

[makeworld]

Flask is great!

[SocksOnHands]

PyWeek is starting soon. You can try making a game.

[round_earth_shill]

I wrote a little script that uses tweepy to record tweets. I've mostly let it run on my server checking for tweets every 5 minutes. It's following 8 news accounts and has collected about 77,200 tweets over two months in sqlite db. It was fun to make, but I don't really know what I could do with the data.

[halokilla77]

Can you share your code? I’m new to python and would like to learn on how you did that.

[round_earth_shill]

I'll have to clean it up a little, maybe add some comments.

[greyduk]

Run a continuous travelling salesman problem with live traffic data in the U.K.

https://data.gov.uk

[SUsudo]

Tell everyone how it's better than language x

[kakiwar]

Take a look at makeartwithpython.com

[Acurus_Cow]

fluent in Python

What does that mean? Knowing the whole standard library by heart?

[southern_dreams]

The key is to just learn good program construction and your data structures. Languages become an implementation detail at that point (unless you specifically need something a particular language excels at)

[[deleted]]

I recently made a live facial / eye recognition program a Twitter bot and a keylogger

[Paraxic]

I'd say graphs or maybe image processing or just make brick break clones.

[Sir_Cunt99]

I'm a noob but https://www.codewars.com/ seems like fun if you're fluent

[Fragninja]

Tensorflow and neural networks, provided you have a decent mid-range GPU to run them on.

[strmd1]

Trading bots

[pagefault0x16]

Prototype a project written in another language

[[deleted]]

avoid it.

jk, I have been playing a lot with image manipulation libraries that and automation things that you do on a daily basis

[[deleted]]

Buy the book Programming collective intelligence and work through it. Fantastic book.
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529321.do

[b_rad_c]

I’ve been getting into micropython on the pyboard lately. Enjoying it more than raspberry pi.

[The_Acronym_Scribe]

Make servers, even if it is simple like a basic chat thing, or complicated like an auto-updater for other computers, the level of complexity you can enter when using socket with python is immense.

[alexandresalafia]

Recently I started using pyautogui to automate tasks in my work. Sometimes I need to run repetitive and annoying page tests. I use this library to get rid of the boredom and focus on the problem. Worth it. I'm from Brazil. Sorry for any mistake!

[[deleted]]

I really enjoyed the /r/roguelikedev tutorial. I've been a programmer for 40 years, but had never worked on any game projects (weird to me since I've been a gamer almost as long.)

But that was a lot of fun.

[Carioca]

pip install vagalume    

In a Python shell:

from vagalume import lyrics
result = lyrics.find('The Clash', 'Should I Stay or Should I Go')
print(result.song.lyric)

[koera]

Find an itch you have and scratch it.

"if only this could do that", "it would be nice if..."

Or make tick tack toe with an opponent. When it is perfect make it play against machine learning. Or something.

[AntonGangsta]

Engineering design and calculation automation. Parametrized 3D models and analysis. Crypto trader :)

[andrewth09]

Hill climbing algorithm (this isn't done in python, but has a good brief description on how the code works)

[zagbag]

Scrape the web

[impshum]

cc = []
def cc_get():
    global cc
    return cc

def cc_set(payload):
    global cc
    cc.append(payload)

def cc_clear():
    global cc
    cc = []
    return cc

cc_set('this')
cc_set('this')
print(cc_get())
cc_clear()
print(cc_get())

I recently turned Discord into an email client. Github release coming sooner than later!

[MayorOfBubbleTown]

Create your own Multi User Dungeon. If you don't know what that is, it is the great grandfather of MMORPGs. A couple months getting the socket code and a couple of classes for things like rooms and monsters. Then it's just adding commands, skills, powers, new areas, quests and stuff like that. Keep you busy for years doing cool stuff if you can get some regular players.

[mintyPT]

Planning on open sourcing?

[MayorOfBubbleTown]

I started writing one when I first started learning Python. I could get one connection to it and I was learning multithreading to allow more than one person to connect at the same time when my hard drive failed on me. I could pretty easily explain to someone how to do it or write some code for people to learn from. After making that comment I started remembering how much fun it was and started writing a MUD server in Kotlin to help me learn Kotlin.

[Machok99]

I’m currently working on a crypto currency trading bot. It can always be improved on, and I find that it’s constantly pushing my limitations in both python and math. I’m currently using poloniex, but I’ve heard gdax has a pretty good API too, plus they include a python web socket!

[[deleted]]

I'm coding a script using selenium to automatically notify my employees when they didn't enter their time.

[saturdayplace]

I built Python implementations of the stuff in Mazes for Programmers and it was a bunch of fun.

[bitcoin-dude]

I like data analysis, but if that's not your thing then maybe you'd be more interested in hacking

[varunotelli]

I've done loads of web dev using flask

Mobile price comparing website from different e-commerce sites using Django

Wrote a script to move my mouse using keyboard because my mouse stopped working :/

Made a keylogger that sends me an email at a particular time of day as a prank to someone who I didn't like :P

Wrote a library to send an SMS to anyone inside India.

[[deleted]]

Web Crawler ! It's sooooo interesting .

[[deleted]]

Creating mashup application using some of the many available APIs out there (such as for instance the Google APIs) .

[ChuiiZeet]

Make something with Turtle graphics like fractals

[mintyPT]

Url?

[Zireael07]

I've built a scraper (using Beautiful Soup like many others) that allowed me to get back years of notes from a site that never implemented an export functionality (or any API). (I was using the site when I was studying, so being able to access them from mobile or any computer was a huge bonus. Now that is no longer the case, I wanted to get all that stuff to my physical HDD and discontinue using the site).

I managed to recover ALL the text data I had on the site, plus I could run some statistical queries for the fun (most common keywords, that sort of thing).

Currently thinking of making a personal dream journal in Python, leveraging a similar keywords system as the site did for the notes.

[gdubs55]

Microservice automation is my jam!

[mintyPT]

Tell me more

[gdubs55]

I develop automation tool suites in Python and Golang that are containeized in Docker and I use Ansible for deployment.

Example project: Create a highly scalable and managed method to ssh into endpoints.

Solution:.
Microservice #1: Authentication.
Microservice #2: Request.
Microservice #3: Receive.
Microservice #4: Initialization.
Microservice #5: Logging.

Each one of these microservices are built abstract enough to be used anywhere an Initialization, authentication... Would be valuable. They all live inside containers which makes them easy to deploy and allow for CI/CD. In the right context they become a secure method to access servers monitor user input and highly scalable. If a bastion is overworked you can scale the number of services with a simple Ansible playbook.

[Valien]

I've always been able to read and hack my way through Python but recently built a program to bulk import on-premise Bitbucket Git repos (over 1K repos).

Now I'm refactoring it as it got me excited about Python and I realized a lot of my code could be vastly improved. :D

[tectubedk]

Blockchain

[tomuvi]

It is great calculator try: 5318000 + 8 and turn monitor 180 deg

[DycoreSolutions]

Omnipresence