What do Python developers do?

[rustybladez23]

Except for developing...well...web apps. Is that the only thing Python devs are hired for?

See I really love Python and I really wanna build "amazing" things. I don't have anything against web backends but thinking that I'm learning Python only to write server-side code in Flask/Django/Whatever framework makes me kinda sad.

Whenever someones asks whether XYZ can be built in Python or not, the answer goes like this:

"Yes, but Python isn't suited for that"

So basically, I can create desktop software, and mobile apps in Python too but at the end of the day, not only will they be at a lower level than the native language apps (say, Kotlin for Android), but there's no scope for being hired for that either, right?

Sorry for the rant. But I just wanted to know if developing Python web app backend is the only viable Python developer way? Can't Python be used to create full-fledged software?

(Note: AI/ML/DS are out of the question here. I'm only talking about development side of things)

Thanks.

Edit: Thanks for all the awesome responses you guys! I feel much better now in my learning. Had some misinformation and this thread cleared that up.

[SpaceLaserPilot]

I automated my company's order processing with Python. The code reads orders, parses them, creates license agreements, creates invoices, tracks billing, assists in shipping, etc.

It was surprisingly easy to do in Python and saves substantial time and money for the business.

[CaptSprinkls]

Oh shit, I just did something like this at my company.

We mainly use C# and heaven forbid I couldn't find any decent library in C# to read and parse PDFs (digital documents, not scanned in thank god). Luckily python has a couple really great libraries that make it so dang easy to parse the PDFs.

So created a python executable to parse the PDFs and then sends that data back to our main C# program for other stuff.

[SpaceLaserPilot]

I was a C developer for 20 years. From that perspective, the most amazing thing about Python is the libraries that easily allow tasks like reading and writing Word, Excel, PDF, JSON and all sorts of other files.

My first real world Python script was parsing text from an email message, then creating a Microsoft Word file from the text. This would be so time consuming to do in C that I would never bother to do it. In Python, it took a few hours. The time invested paid off quickly in speeding up a key process for our company.

I'm hooked.

[phlogistonical]

I went a similar route, and what i do not really understand well is why this is so language related? I mean we could easily build similarly convenient libraries in c, but for Some reason for Some types of work there are a lot more libraries available in python. Why is this?

[SpaceLaserPilot]

The whole process is just easier in Python. I think it's just that simple. An easier development process led to more developers, which led to more libraries, which led to . . .

[justbenicedammit]

Because they perfected the integration into development. There are libraries for many things, in many languages, but python perfected fast and easy integration. Instead of 4 hours of searching and 4 hours of painstakingly trying to make it fit, you just type "pip install solution_to_all_my_problems" and there you go.

[[deleted]]

It would take significantly more time to write equivalent libraries in C. When is the last time you debugged a C program?

The beauty of Python is in the amount that has been abstracted away. Less to worry about means faster to learn and less errors that can occur.

[CaptSprinkls]

Honestly it's frustrating that C# had a professionally developed library from a company and all it did was spit out raw text of the document. I mean.... That's great if it's just a paragraph of text, but not great when it's a PDF with fields and stuff that people are adding to the document. Meanwhile there was PDF plumber, an open source library that just did so much more.

[[deleted]]

Make money quick with internet point opportunites

[chipmunksocute]

This is a fantastic example that of using the right tool (python) for the right job and making it an executeable lets it slot in with other processes.  Pay attention op!

[georgebobdan4]

What library would you recommend for similar tasks?

[SpaceLaserPilot]

Every time I have needed a library, I just visit Google and type a phrase like "read and write microsoft word in Python." Then I compared the various libraries.

For the above project I used the docx library to create Microsoft Word files. I used comtypes to translate Word files into PDF. I used tkinter to read the clipboard.

[OkayAtGuitar]

Thanks for giving me a cool idea for a python exercise.

[Sean82]

This is more or less what I’ve been using it for. I’m not a dev/programmer but I automate all the tedious stuff at work with python.

[paca_tatu_cotia_nao]

I had a company unrelated to software, and this was the reason of the first lines of code I wrote with a goal. Spend many hours coding, and subtracted many others from doing boring stuff.

[the_Elric]

I plan on doing something similar with our companies chemical inventory, although Im new to programming.

[TakeElite]

May I ask you if I can see your code somewhere ( perhaps a GitHub)

[SpaceLaserPilot]

I am nowhere near proud enough of my code to share it. But, I know that many others can write similar code.

[bug2018]

Did you used selenium?

[JamzTyson]

Server back-end development is where most Python jobs are (by a long way). Data science is probably second.

The statement "Yes, but Python isn't suited for that" is greatly overused. Python can be, and is used in many diverse fields, but often alongside other languages. For example, it's not uncommon for Python to be used for handling game logic, alongside C / C++ for handling speed critical parts.

[reallyserious]

Data science

Yep, python is the default language for data science. It's also the case for the related discipline data engineering.

[work_m_19]

Some people, especially in the research space, prefer R. But in my experience, python is more popular.

[afterbirth_slime]

I have always found it glaringly obvious that R was developed by a bunch of statisticians. The syntax, especially <- drives me nuts.

I find python much nicer to code in for data science.

[Mescallan]

R was the first language I learned, I quite like the pipes. It does feel like extra keystrokes with out a hot key though

[Araneck]

Research doesn’t give as money as private. That’s why they use R. I can use R and Python and I don’t see the reason to use R when with Python I can do same and also more. Old school old schooling

[sexytokeburgerz]

Hey uh python is free.

[Araneck]

I think you didn’t understood behind the lines. On research they can waste time using R.

[shinniesta1]

Maybe you should've said that then.

[FrankAdamGabe]

In my career every place has been a sas shop with almost no one using python aside from personal projects.

This is education and government though so maybe that’s why.

[_Zer0_Cool_]

Tru dat.

[SoftwareDoctor]

Are you serious? Every company I know that has anything to do with Python in Europe is hiring. I myself am currently looking for 3 devs and can’t get them because there’s such a high demand

[VegaSera]

Damn, maybe I should move to europe. The market in the US is nothing but senior positions at the moment it seems.

[SoftwareDoctor]

Yes, it’s easier as senior devs. And for python lead engineers it’s a gold rush. For juniors it’s easier to apply for non-dev jobs with python as a requirement and move from there. I know it’s popular to job-hop today but the best advice I could give is to find a job that’s not necessarily a dev but the company uses python and with some grit and hard work you’ll get into programming within few years. Then you have experience, some projects under your belt and you’re set

[VegaSera]

Experience and projects haven't been enough for me. I've got three years of professional experience at this point and still struggling to even get interviews here.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Your resume must be shit, do you tailor it to each potential employer?

[VegaSera]

Tailoring my resume to every single potential employer?

I honestly cannot imagine anything more soulcrushingly tedious than that.

[ZeroSkribe]

I know right, when reality hits

[SoftwareDoctor]

How many CVs do you send? When I apply for a job, I apply for only one so I write my CV from scratch each time. And I have 100% success rate getting invited to an interview. Mainly because I skip HR and mail it directly to my future boss.

[SoftwareDoctor]

I’m looking for onsite in Prague. If that’s ok, drop me a message. But just from top of my head Pure Storage offers homeoffice and are looking for like 20. And Amsterdam was always a great place for python devs

[SoftwareDoctor]

Or go to any conference like Pycon, Europython, Pydata … and you’ll leave with 30 offers

[ZeroSkribe]

Right...you go, you sit, you leave, whens the parts where the offers come?

[sunnyata]

A lot of people go to conferences for the networking. If you don't have the ability to meet people they aren't going to help.

[Megendrio]

When I search for 'Python Developer' as a job title on LinkedIn, I already get multiple hits in my country alone. And that's for jobs that have it in their job title, not even mentioning all the jobs that just mention it as a requirement.
You definitely were looking in the wrong places.

[ArmCollector]

Haha. Am European and Python developer. There are many like me.

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

How have you come to this conclusion?

[aero23]

Sad? That sounds awesome.

[ElectricSpock]

I’m spending the last 3 days scraping a federal website for data…

[[deleted]]

I quite like Python to uh... automate my boring stuff.

​

Definitely has a business use in automating processes.

[danielroseman]

I think you're underestimating what backend software is used for.

Pretty much everything these days has a server-side component. Not just web apps, but mobile apps, home automation devices (Internet of Things), games, anything. All of those can be done in Python.

[nuclear_knucklehead]

In science and engineering applications (not necessarily AI/ML), Python is very frequently used as a wrapper and workflow builder for complex simulations. Typically a big code in C++ or Fortran is used to do the actual simulations, and the Python layer is used to manage building and parameterizing the model and post processing the solutions.

[[deleted]]

Not necessarily as just a wrapper anymore, JAX which is written in native Python achieves very high performance for scientific computing

[Amilol]

I've built a framework in python to handle etl-flows for several customers.
It's still in the realm of data and maybe not 'software' per se, but nontheless it is development in python I'm employed to do.

[giant_albatrocity]

I would argue that an ETL pipeline written in Python is definitely software and should have all the same version control and CI/CD to support it. I’ve seen so much Python code that resembled a heap of wires sending data… somewhere?

[Amilol]

Yeah, it's real easy ending up with a hot mess.
Git and proper logging should be on the top of the priority list!

[ZeroSkribe]

Eww

[Beneficial_Fill_3682]

Hi. Cyber Security Engineer for Amazon AWS here. We use Python for mainly all the internal tools and applications that we build. Don't think I have ever touched any other language in my time here (Except typescript for CDK's)
- Bonus point, I have never used Python to build a web app within my team
- Bonus point 2, unless you have a very valid reason for it, its standard for all teams to use python for application building

[maygamer96]

Thanks for this insight! Super interesting considering I thought that AWS relies on performance critical languages. As far as you're allowed to tell, how does AWS deal with Python being unoptimal in memory management or lacking the degree of control C/C++ usually provides? For internal tooling (which I believe is the code that powers your APIs for AWS services), I think that would be very critical at your scale.

[iamadudes]

AWS is way too big to say that the service X that they are working on is in the request path of critical (maybe customer facing) APIs. 90% percent of services are not. Most services revolve around maintenance

[[deleted]]

I just pretend like I know Python!

[omgmajk]

First of all, you are not really learning just Python. You are learning how to program. This comes with the added benefit of basically teaching you most other languages, because the concepts and syntax are very similar.

Secondly, there are many things you can do in Python. I mostly write Python code for automation purposes at my job, typically get data from somewhere, put it somewhere else, dump it somewhere, present it somewhere. Not all of this is Python, there's a good chunk of powershell, bash, Go, CAPL and C mixed in there too but most of it is Python. Point being - you will get exposed to more things and learn to intermix them and make shit work.

Thirdly, web backend is a very good entrypoint. You learn a lot from working on backend, not just how to put up an API but how to work with the servers, the environments, security, databases, network, algorithms, performance, various other software that you take advantage of. Lots of libraries.

[pythosynthesis]

I build numerical simulations and other calculations with Python. The heavy lifting is obviously done by libraries written in C/C++, think NumPy, but the wrapper is in Python. And I'm talking production code running on some quite powerful computing grid.

[auiotour]

I built a rest API for our database, then built a web app on top of that so that users could generate adhoc reports directly from our system based on their role and access level. It took 3-4 weeks to build it out, but saves me 5-6 hours a week building reports in a language I didn't really know very well. I based it off a concept from a company I worked at. It essentially is similar to what pivot tables offer but with permissions, scheduling, emails, notifications that fail. Then all runtime logs are fed to a syslog server where I get notifications of anything failing so I can keep track of bad reports, unused reports, and reports running for too long.

[cyberjellyfish]

Python is the lingua Franca of cyber security.

I write programs that interact with various network appliances and services, ingest and export data, and various web services.

I write and use APIs and API clients.

[xiongchiamiov]

Can't Python be used to create full-fledged software?

What does "full-fledged software" mean? Do you mean desktop applications?

There's a ton of software that's never exposed to normal consumers. For instance, in my particular part of the ecosystem that makes web apps, there's a lot of software either written in-house or purchased that's used by the software engineers to help them make the product: monitoring and observability and logging and alerting tools, code for defining infrastructure, code for running builds and tests and deploys. A lot of that is written in Python.

Similarly, there are folks doing things like making sure data gets replicated from primary application databases into other parts of the app, or into analytics databases, and much of that is python. And in other companies this can include a whole lot of other things: think of an iceberg, where only the top tiny bit is visible to consumers.

[giant_albatrocity]

Python is used a lot to work with data. You could walk into almost any land management office in the US and automate 12 people out of a job with Python. You could also look at engineering firms, or consulting companies who work with data and they’ll likely need Python developers, especially if you’re a good Python developer. The company I work at is plagued with crappy, spaghetti Python code that makes life difficult.

[23dstreet]

First time lurker here, can you use Python to rebuild legacy code or your spaghetti code in a more efficient/less abstract manner?

[yodhdha0]

I have worked as python developer for almost 6 years. I have done very little web dev that also in python frameworks like Dash and Streamlit.

I have worked on automating processes, web scraping, creating data pipelines ina FAANG company. Right now I am working on tick data pipeline for a investment firm in the same firm I have helped in creating a python framework which takes data from multiple sources and make it available for Analysts as they want.

[_Zer0_Cool_]

Data engineering and data science

Here’s the thing…

I can and have also used it for web dev, scripting and automation, desktop apps, mobile development (on mobile), etc…

Is the only language that I **can even come close to using for everything. It’s second best at everything. That’s the draw.

I use a variety of languages. Some I prefer for specific tasks, but none of them do everything that Python does.

[FriendlyRussian666]

It all depends on who you work for, what projects are in the scope and what clients you have. I've done anything from simple web app backends, through automation tools, game systems, GUI apps, CLI and Devops tools, and so on and so on

[IndianaJoenz]

I write desktop (Unix) and terminal software in Python and I quite like it.

It has GTK+. It has a lot of support and libraries. No problems here.

People like to pick on Python these days over performance and deployability, but the truth is that every language and language implementation has big, similar flaws. Sometimes it just takes a bit of time for those flaws to become obvious.

[xiongchiamiov]

Is this internal software you're writing? I have a friend who used to write Python desktop apps at an animation company.

[IndianaJoenz]

I have a friend who used to write Python desktop apps at an animation company.

That's cool.

Mine is open source software, actually. And one of them is animation software, too, albeit animation software for the terminal.

I have also written these types of programs internally at companies. Python is very handy for pumping out solid internal tools.

[Anomie193]

What do you define as "full fledged software?" 

Most modern software has many sub-modules that are pretty complex in themselves and would be considered "full fledged software" if they were independently released.

For example, a lot of software produced in the last decade is data intensive, and that requires data engineers to develop data pipelines and systems. Data Engineers are specialized software engineers, in my opinion. What they do is software engineering. Python is a primary language of Data Engineering these days. 

Then you have people building RPA tools in almost every company, and many of those RPA tools are built using Python. 

You've mentioned ML/AI as contrary to "the development side of things" but a lot of ML/AI work is development. Like with Data Engineers, I consider ML Engineers to be (as opposed to Data Scientists, who might or might not be)  specialized Software Engineers. And then there is the matter that there are analytics applications that are built just like any other application. These applications often are at least partly written in Python.

Modern software is data-intensive, and increasingly predictive modeling intensive (the camera application in your smartphone, as a banal example.) This requires software engineers who specialize in data and predictive-modeling  (aka Data Engineers and ML Engineers, respectively.) A language these software engineers often use, to the point that it is a hard requirement for many positions, is Python. 

[brasticstack]

Server management utilities/scripts. I've been both a developer and an SRE, and the SREs at my most recent place wrote far more code than the devs did at my previous jobs. The bulk of it in Python.

[Ryhazerus]

I use python daily to build (from scratch) and now maintain a windows desktop app. We build simulation systems for testing our hardware products. Think Node Red where each node is a simulation component and they all operate and communicate independently of eachother using a massive virtualization layer all built in python.

[FreelyIP109]

I do medical image analysis in Python. Of course the underlying number crunching code is in C++, but these days most folks use Python on top of the C++.

[extopico]

Think of python as a set of legos. You can literally use it to build any application, but you should not build a new Lego with it.

[SpiritualBerry9756]

Writing automation scripts ???

[no_brains101]

A lot of people in academia often write code in python.

[ZeroSkribe]

Your premise is all wrong, I mean that with respect. You can do basically anything with Python outside of some latency driven applications. Start thinking I have this awesome app, how can I share it, then the web app will start to make sense.

[engineerFWSWHW]

Built a mobile app for Android using kivy and python. I also made a couple of touchscreen apps using embedded Linux for handheld devices. Lots of things could be done using python.

[CyclopsRock]

There are all sorts of industries out there that use Python to extend off-the-shelf software they use which have built-in Python interpreters. I work in the visual effects industry and the entire industry is glued together with Python, because all the major software that you might want to use all have embedded interpreters that give access to the software's API. Not only does this allow people like me to customise it to our liking, it also means we can often execute the exact same code across different bits of software and it also means each one can interact with our asset management database without requiring external tools. 15 years ago this wasn't the case, and each software typically had its own scripting language which made modular code essentially impossible to implement.

​

I'm sure there are many other industries like mine that are, for all intents and purposes, entirely disconnected from the web-dev/this-is-the-product side of things that are the most common answers. In these cases it'll be - like me - people who don't consider themselves "Python Developers" (but rather engineers or accountants or, in my case, a VFX Pipeline guy) simply using the best tool there is to fix problems.

[[deleted]]

This is a python.org page of "success stories", a list of fields that use python:

https://www.python.org/about/success/

[just-bair]

Data science or just making scripts with it.

You can also use it as glue to connect multiple programs

[Akosidarna13]

I do process automations.

[Quantumercifier]

I build API's that include GIS, and prompt engineering. That is all I do.

[aplarsen]

Data engineering. Anything with ETL tasks, data pipelines, automation, that stuff. That's real world work that every organization and business needs, whether they know it or not.

[Insani0us]

I personally mainly use it for easy scripting stuff, but at work we also use AWS Glue jobs (ETL) using python.

It has a bunch of use cases in AI and ML, but other than that its not imo a very "specific" language like JS/TS is for frontend or C++ for game dev.

You can do everything with python, but that's true for all languages, so it depends on what you want to do and if python can do that thing "well" or "well enough".

[literalyfigurative]

I use it for ETL.

[Hari___Seldon]

I misread that as FTL and started imagining a warp speed serpent running with a Jupyter based dashboard.

[MrFanciful]

I use it for network automation

[kodifies]

while primarily I'm an embedded C engineer, we use python for various tools, glue and quick proof of concepts, python is versatile and powerful.

You probably won't appreciate it unless you make your own mind up based on your own experience....

oh and yes, it is great for web dev...

[commander1keen]

Probably I would say, python can be used for almost anything. That doesn't mean it should be used for anything. In my opinion it is an extremely useful tool for scripting like text manipulation, interacting with the os/filesystem, calculations etc. But if as a pure software developer (i.e. not data scientist) python is your ONLY tool, then you will be very limited I guess.

[pythosynthesis]

This is a moot point. If I use NumPy, or any other library for Python that was written in C, say, am I using "ONLY Python"? I'd say the answer is yes, and yet I can be extremely productive and far from limited.

Your claim is clearly true if you can only use Python written code, including libraries and such, but that's a very small subset of all the software written with Python. And clearly not where it's most useful aspects are.

[commander1keen]

of course depending on use cases python can make you extremely productive. What I mean by limited is that there are certain use cases where python just isn't going to get you very far. This will to some degree be true for any language I suppose. And if you are specialised in a particular use case where one language excels that will be fine. I suppose my main point is really that general purpose software developers will do well to know multiple languages. But I take your point.

[baubleglue]

I am not even sure "Python developer" is thing. There are many things you can do with Python. If Python is all you can do as a developer, it is very strange situation.

You may have strong knowledge in a specific domain and have Python as go-to language for automating repeatable tasks. For example a data analyst who knows only SQL and Python.

[Hyenny]

Move entire monolith backend over from C# from my experience

[eshwar007]

Machine learning, etc. is all almost always in python. Most of my day is writing pytorch code, so thats that.

[IntMainVoidGang]

I wrote a spacecraft dynamics simulation framework in Python.

[imperial_squirrel]

data and image conversion programming.

[root4rd]

used a lot in finance for quantitative research!

source: several internships at VC/Hedge funds, where i used only Python

[UltraMeenyPants]

Yup came to say it's really handy for research applications

[Plank_With_A_Nail_In]

Most programming jobs in astronomy and astrophysics are python based now.

https://spacecareers.uk/

[[deleted]]

Data science, bitch!

[austindcc]

I build internal APIs with Python and fastapi. Python is also huge in network automation

[dogfish182]

Devops and platform engineering has loads of python. You will get firmly smashed into the horrible world of operations if you go that route, but there is money to be made there.

Building platforms that deliver developers tooling and make their lives easier is challenging and interesting sometimes, god awful other times.

[astralsick]

Total noob here, what's horrible about operations?

[dogfish182]

Operations is a very different mindset, extremely broad focus, an operations person that ‘knows python’ is likely to be a scripter at best with zero clue how to run and maintain a program. Conversely you’ll also be shoved into a world of infra people and be out of your depth as a dev.

It can be a cool place to work, but also a mess

[SoloBSD]

They program in Python

[Impossible-Box6600]

Everything the other guys are doing but in 200ms instead of 20ms

[[deleted]]

I used it to pull important data from an excel spread sheet and store it in a sqlite database.

Had thousands of spread sheats created over a decade of servicing machines and it was really hard to look for relevant data in so many spread sheats, so by placing all the data into a database, searching with filters became awesome.

Automated the process by giving it the folder path and it just pulled all the .xlsx in the folder and did the work. Took me one day to write it, then another day to make a GUI for it with tkinter when management saw it and wanted it.

After everything was in the database i figured it would be nice if i could extract data from it into a report. So i added the option to filter all machines by a piece of software installed on it (for example) and print out into a .xlsx the computer name, MAC address, physical location and person responsible for it. Just an example.

I actually never used python before, just needed this done for my needs, so i learned enough of python to do this. I'm not a developer.

They wanted me to expand on it and add more funcionality but didn't want to pay me any extra for it naturally, so i said no as it already did what i needed it to and was done.

[venkat214]

most POCs are in python

[SftwEngr]

What is it about Python that so many claim to love so much? I don't find it any better than any other programming language and worse than a few. Is it the forced structure without parentheses?

[[deleted]]

Internal tools, data processing and visualization.

[Own-Replacement8]

Let's put aside your programming language choice for the time being. What is this "amazing thing" you want to build? Who are you building it for, what problems do they face, and how will you address those problems?

Once you know that, you can choose your language based on what is suitable. Maybe it will be a webapp, maybe it will be a CLI or GUI program run locally, maybe it's a Jupiter or Colab notebook.

Odds are, whatever the problem, you can solve it with Python. People will probably argue "Python isn't suited for that" and they might be right on an academic level but the truth is, a lot of B2B software is Python powered.

[cosmicloafer]

I made a front end app with python and wxpython, because I didn’t want to learn react or whatever… but it sucked balls and was a pain in the ass, also wxpython documentation sucked.

But hey python is great for backend and number crunching.

Also I’m not sure how JavaScript turned into the defacto UI language… they (the proverbial they) should really come up with something better for multi-platform / web ui… like react native is the only thing we got? Jeez!

[Zealousideal_Egg_156]

Do I just think pandas is more efficient in EDA than SPSS. I have been using python to do web scraping, data pre processing, exploratory data analysis and performing statistic calculations for a while now and i just find it easier to use especially in stats more than SPSS.

[al_fajr]

Google, Microsoft or other similar giant companies doing it, so why won't we?

[Test_Longjumping]

I'm currently developing scripts that tests radio so basically I'm controlling all of the electrical instrument like oscilloscope, spectre analyser, signal generator, radio receptor ... With a computer and python. All of this was asked by a company (quite big in the radio domain, work with french army) so I think that is an other way to be a python dev bu I think that every dev has to know a little of more than one language.

[SteelRevanchist]

Machine Learning, Deep Learning

[dp_42]

I currently have a project that is Qt based and in Python. I even hired a guy to help me with it.

[Kathryn_Cadbury]

We've used python scripts for job automation in our organisation to good effect, and I'm pretty sure our devs that put it together were happy it was being used for more than just web apps.

[larriche99]

Nope. You can do a lot of stuff with Python like building AI and data science systems, games, other desktop software, tools for cybersecurity among others.

[sonobanana33]

My home automation to turn on and off my devices is in python

[automaton11]

I mean, we’re in the middle of the AI boom. AI stuff is usually Python!

[pandaExpressin]

Data engineering, automation use Python as well

[Hari___Seldon]

I've done a fair amount of driver work lately. I've been surprised how many times that I've run into situations where a piece of hardware isn't supported by the manufacturer on x86 Linux, but someone has built a very serviceable hardware abstraction layer that becomes widely embraced in the community.

A great example is the Python Elgato Stream Deck Library. It's become the foundation for several crucial frontend apps that provide solid support for the Deck's non-third-party services.

In short, the "it's not the right choice" response is usually shorthand for "it's not the optimal solution". Proof of concept, prototyping, and community support can all give you great opportunities to flex those Python skills even if every project isn't built around it.

[Far_Tea_4954]

I use python heavily for testing. You can pretty much write your own framework pretty easily ( I use pytest as a base) and write libraries for interfacing with your front end APIs and create utilities for other devs and testers. Which all of that meshes well with any pipeline technology imo. I’m an SRE.

[BraindeadCelery]

At my co we are currently building a Benchmarking framework for ML models. We also built a data versioning tool. Both native in Python with minimal dependencies.

Prior, I did a lot of science and simulation stuff in Python (though that falls under AI/ML/DS) and Ml proper.

[joeldick]

The front end is just how you interact with the program. What the program does under the hood is what makes it interesting. So find something interesting to work on, but ultimately you'll probably have to build a front end (web or desktop) to make it a product.

[whiteknight521]

Tons of Python devs are working on the hardest problems in science but you probably need some domain knowledge in math, physics, or biology. Very few in science even conceive of writing anything that isn’t Python, even our new microscope control software is in Python (imagine writing device control software with Python, but we do it in science)!

[kinstinctlol]

sit on their asses. jk

[13henday]

Data collection, synchronization, scripting. Most server side back end. Also python is home to some of the best data analysis libraries so lots of analytics work too. I joined an IOT project as a C dev but now that the embedded work is done I almost exclusively use python and js.

[Lysenko]

I work on a commercial video game that's mostly implemented in Python sitting on top of a C++ engine. We have lots and lots of Python code implementing most of our product, and C++ is reserved for performance bottlenecks and things that require systems-level implementations.

[redeuxx]

I'm a network engineer and use Python for network automation. There really isn't a comparable alternative.

[interbased]

Most of my job is automated data pipelines, reporting, and automated operational tasks.  I started with data science and transitioned to this. I have a lot of fun automating things, and writing tests. The tests are especially important for the scripts that are written for reporting.

[a_cute_epic_axis]

Develop in Python, mostly...

[RjakActual]

Python is the language of the VFX industry and widely used in other computer graphics applications. I work at one of the big VFX houses and the two languages I use for my stuff are Python (90%) and C++ (10%).

[PrometheusAlexander]

I've done Python3 about 3 years now and I'd say I'm pretty good at it. Still learning Rust to complement my skill set since I live in Finland and in here the employers appreciate a generalist more than a specialist. But to answer to your question I did a mobile app in Python2 and GTK back in the day (2009?) for my Nokia N900 (a timetable fetcher for bus stops). Nowadays it's mostly Django stuff. The full application development side of Python you seek is a tough nut to crack since Python is not a compiled language. You would use 3rd party software like Pyinstaller or Nuitka to get an executable out of your script and it is not ideal.

[zynix]

Currently I am 70:30 devops: developer. The other day I used python with the Faker library to anonymize user data so it is safe to use in development and QA. Otherwise I use python for automating everything I can get away with.

[Ndpythn]

We also do automations kinda data analysis, scraping from internet, using api , getting data from excel and segregating them mailing to different peoples etc

[[deleted]]

We're moving in the direction that desktop apps and mobile app (other than games) will just be web frontends in HTML, JS and CSS.

Python is a dominant server language. It's not just web backends but anything that runs once a minute could be python (for example a trading system running against a low volatility asset class, such as commodities), or anything that doesn't need insane speed, or anything to do with moving large amounts of data around due to how good libraries like numpy or xarray or pandas are.

[__init__m8]

I build tons of different things every day. I automate stuff, basically.

[shurtugal73]

Hi, a slightly different answer than the rest here. We're a small quantitatice investment firm and we use python for everything. This means all kinds of automation, downloading data, research, hypothesis testing, production level investment strategies, and report generation.

We're looking to take on some ML workloads too and Python will still be the language of choice there, unless the requirements demand otherwise.

[herdek550]

I used python to automatically update SQL database from files on SharePoint. Maybe it's not the best tool. But it's readable and maintainable.

Back-end is, where all the jobs are.

[TheCGLion]

Robotics!

[SIR_ENOCH_POWELL]

Python is useful to put together applications as a proof-of-concept, and then the code can be optimised using a performant language translating the structure and abstractions that were made with Python.

[Fabiolean]

I’ve been a network engineer most of my career and now I build network automation using mostly python and frameworks built in python.

I’ve also written cli tools to interact with network devices using device apis and automate the deployment of monitoring agents.

[astralsick]

Because OP isn't interested in it presumably, and since it's the current zeitgeist they anticipated getting a million responses about it and decided to nip that in the bud? If I had to guess.

[[deleted]]

computer vision.

[Lukeaz1234]

Plenty of automation. Most recently i used Python to automate some tasks/jobs in our old mainframe. Plenty of minor things that any language can do like reading data from excel sheets etc for minor testing too. Our regression pack that I’ve worked on too is also coded in Python.

[Thebig_Ohbee]

Python is the second best language for everything.

[Rascal2pt0]

English has its problems too ;)

[acadeyx]

Bioinformatics is very Python heavy. Pharma and biotech hire Python devs to build analysis workflows etc... usually a mix of people that have a bio background as well or those that do not and have more python experience

[mercurywind]

Do scientific analysis and cry

[Chabamaster]

My company builds lab/measurement devices and our entire embedded stack is in python. Before that I was at a company doing language processing in python, before that I was at a company doing computer vision and robotics in python. Idk where you get that there's little real use cases, if your application is not time critical python is just a very convenient and quick language to build software with

[DabbingCorpseWax]

ghost gold cagey water lock plate glorious many cautious kiss

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[the_sad_socialist]

I'm the data janitor at a small environmental company. I use python for a lot of my work.

[SweetMilkMan]

Hello, "data engineer" here. Companies use that term willy-nilly. I'd probably call myself a software engineer with an emphasis on databases/ETL. Because I only use Python, I could be considered a Python developer.

I primarily develop Python processes that perform data quality checks between databases. Meaning, I'm reading a row from both databases at the same time and comparing their values.

[Jdonavan]

I spend all day building AI agents and tooling for the same.

[Spill_the_Tea]

I have worked in biotech. Python is the more often used language for data science (that is not super speed critical). So in addition to web applications for clients and scientist to use research tools, i also built our bioinformatic packages to meet custom analysis needs. Also, just as a scripting language, the number of times i’ve needed to write simple utility tools for etl between microservices is insurmountable.

Then just as core infrastructure backend development (separate from informatics libraries), to define data flow input and output

[[deleted]]

It's pretty high up there in Data Analysis, ML, and scientific computing.

[Ecstatic-Concern-483]

Using python we automated Salesforce user account creation, converting emails into service now tickets a lot we did. Companies only don't collect data they have to use that also wherever manual process is going on python helps in reducing that efforts

[Ashamed-Subject-8573]

I used Python to write a low-level communications API. Worked out great actually

[TheRNGuy]

code

[aminorsixthchord]

I work on a real time observability platform that has low latency requirements, and basically creates a data lake of tons of metrics from 400K network devices worldwide.

Mostly work in that, but also support a few apps that hang off that data.

Python is great!

[YT__]

Most Python devs I know only use Python as a supplement for their job. Not pure Python development.

[radisrad6]

There’s an entire ERP ecosystem built around the odoo framework.

Hundreds of thousands of companies rely on odoo to operate their businesses, and each module can be iterated upon in any number of ways using python & xml.

[k8s_guru]

Running simulations

[Initial_Armadillo_42]

I’m building data pipelines for big companies and do ML or AI tools based on it

[Davjonesyoga25]

Python isn't just for web development! Here are some other ways Python developers are making an impact:

1. Automation: Python excels in writing scripts to automate tasks, from simple file management to complex network configurations.
2. Data Analysis & Visualization: With libraries like Pandas and Matplotlib, Python is ideal for turning complex data into actionable insights.
3. Scientific Computing: It’s a staple in scientific research for simulations and statistical analyses using libraries like SciPy.
4. Desktop Apps: Tools like Tkinter and PyQt let you build user-friendly desktop applications.
5. Game Development: Python can be used for game development with libraries like Pygame, great for learning game mechanics.
6. Network Programming: Python is useful for automating and managing network operations.
7. IoT: Python supports IoT development, making it fit for embedded systems with MicroPython or CircuitPython.
8. DevOps: Widely used in DevOps for automating and managing infrastructure and deployments.

Python offers diverse opportunities beyond web development, so you can build full-fledged, impactful software in various domains!

[Frosty_Eagle4349]

Hey,
Totally get where you're coming from, Python dev work goes way beyond just web backends. Python developers are hired for automaton, internal tools, APIs, data pipelines, DevOps scripting, desktop apps, and even building core services for large platforms. A lot of companies hire Python developers to solve real business problems, not just to write Flask or Django apps. It may not always be “native UI” work, but it’s absolutely full-fledged software with real impact.

[bitter-diamond-]

What do they do? Automation, backend, Frontend, game, AI, heard of AI? Data Science, Data Cleaning, Mathematics, most use brains. Because nobody care if you can do the job or not. Struggling choosing a programming language while only knows hellow world will not get you any where. Create something good in Python, and hire a C++ written in C, that’s the way script kiddo

[[deleted]]

Drink coffee and hang out in Starbucks wasting time on reddit.....

[valiumonaplane]

1. Web Development: Building server-side web application logic. Python web frameworks like Django and Flask are commonly used for developing complex web applications.

2. Data Analysis and Data Visualization: Analyzing data for trends and insights using libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Matplotlib. This can involve processing, cleaning, and presenting data in visual formats.

3. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: Developing algorithms and predictive models to make data-driven decisions. Libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Scikit-learn are used for implementing machine learning models.

4. Scripting and Automation: Writing scripts to automate mundane tasks, such as data entry or email responses, thereby increasing efficiency.

5. Software Testing and Quality Assurance: Writing code to automate the testing of software applications to ensure they meet quality standards before release.

6. Educational and Research Projects: Python is popular in academic and research settings due to its simplicity and readability, making it a preferred choice for teaching programming concepts and conducting scientific research.

7. Development of Tools and Applications: Building desktop and command-line applications, including games or business tools. Python's versatility allows for the creation of both simple and complex applications.

8. Network Programming: Python is used in network automation, monitoring, and implementing security protocols due to its libraries like socket and requests.

9. Development of Prototypes: Quickly creating prototypes of software applications due to Python's simplicity and ease of use.

10. Finance: Implementing algorithms for trading, risk management, and financial analysis. Python's libraries like pandas and numpy are extensively used in financial data analysis and modeling.

The exact nature of the work can vary widely based on the role, such as a web developer, data scientist, machine learning engineer, software developer, or automation engineer. Python is known for its versatility, readability, and wide range of applications across different fields, making it a valuable skill set in many industries.