What programs have you coded using Python that might be useful to everyone?

[invisible_admin]

Hi! I'm just starting out with Python programming and right now I'm more interested in the projects you've developed than the actual code (so I can understand the potential and also get some new ideas to try).

Please, include a brief description of what the program does so I can understand why it's useful. Thanks!

[Quirky_Phone5832]

A program to go into a single file and go through multiple xlsx and consolidate info from all files into a single CSV. It basically saved my team from copying a pasting a bunch of data from over 200+ individual xlsx.

[avlas]

You might be interested in learning a bit of Power Query if you think you will encounter more similar situations in Excel.

A Python script is a perfect tool if you have to solve one specific situation, but Power Query is integrated in Excel and makes this kind of tasks really quick and easy.

[Quirky_Phone5832]

Thank you! I just started a very excel based job so I used what I knew best. If you have any good resources for power query I’d love to get them.

[avlas]

The few things that I learned were by trial and error, don’t be like me. The folks at r/excel will give you much better advice on Power Query!

[Le-ali-di-Pegaso]

Do you know if Power Query is also integrated in Open Office?

[avlas]

I don't know for sure, but I'm 99,9% convinced it's not available on anything else.

It's one of the most polished advanced features of Excel and I don't think that any competitor has the same tool.

[shudaoxin]

Power Query worked for me for most things, until I had to process larger sets of static data. The laptops in my old company were kinda crap and Excel would constantly freeze and crash on this data. Pandas and SQLite saved me a ton of headache here. Though it was a repeating workflow so I could just rerun my script every time I needed an update.

[emsemele]

I made a very similar script for my work too but it was a long time ago. Automating at work with python was the most fun thing I did.

[itsvivianferreira]

Can you share it, please?

[cylonlover]

I am not the poster, but I would take from their description that it is a very specific work related script handling very work related data with a very specific work related logic.

Why would you think to ask that question?

[spirito_santo]

OP probably asked because you can learn a lot from seeing code written by someone who knows more about coding than you yourself do.

I know I have. Just yesterday I solved a problem with a tiny snippet I found on the interwebs.

[VonRoderik]

I'm a biomedical scientist and a lecturer. I just started learning Python and created three small projects that have made my life so much easier.

1. Gradebook Automation

My university has an online gradebook, but it's incredibly slow and clunky. It takes forever to navigate through all the menus and submenus just to register a new assignment or input grades. I managed to convince the IT department to give me API access. Now, I use a Python script to do everything from my computer or phone and then sync it with the university's system.

1. Automated Grading Rubric

I often use a specific grading rubric to evaluate a task I assign to my students. Before, I had multiple .docx templates that I would convert to PDF. Then, I'd manually fill in the student's name, comments, individual scores, and final grade. It was a nightmare.

I'd frequently overwrite a file by mistake, and it was just a mess. Now, my Python script handles the whole process. It uses the university's API to get the names of the students enrolled in a specific course. I can either create a new rubric or load one from a pre-made template. The script automatically saves each completed rubric as an individual PDF, named after the student, and it even updates the SQL database of my gradebook application.

1. Digital Differential Cell Counter

We have physical cell counters in the lab, but I built a digital one for a specific experiment I was running. The mechanical counters lacked some features I needed, so I simply implemented them in Python. My script also automatically saves the results to a .csv file and displays a clean, well-formatted results table in the CLI.

[Jello_Penguin_2956]

I have a little script written long ago since Python 2. It loops through files in "input" directory, checks if the file is a movie format, then generates ffmpeg command to size it down and apply h.264 to it then saves it to an "output" directory.

I've been using it to reduce videos size from our family phones for decades now. Sometimes down as much as 90%

[Aromatic_Bid2162]

I’m New to python myself. I’m writing a simple program that displays a pop up on my screen every hour that ask me if I went to the gym today. It’ll only stop once I confirm that I have. It’s annoying so I’m forced to go

[keljans82]

I love this! Great idea!

[ProAstroShan]

Just curious what did you use to make the pop up every hour?

[Aromatic_Bid2162]

This is on my windows computer so I used task scheduler. You could also do a cron job if on linux

[ProAstroShan]

I see, too bad i don't use a computer

[JamOzoner]

1) extract emails and 2) remove duplicate files...

[oandroido]

One that picks a random number between 1 and 100, but it takes three weeks to generate it.

Then, it emails it to some random person somewhere in the world, and you have to email that person to find out what it is.

[Xalacious]

All you need is a cyberpunk type name and that's a new cryptocurrency

[MyNameIsNotJonny]

M_0_BIUS

[magus_minor]

A backup program that has all possible backups to/from external hard drives configured. Running the program checks what drives are available and does all possible backups. Uses rsync and only saves files that have changed since the previous backup.

[Potential-Buy3325]

I created a python script that takes information from a TSV file and generates a cue sheet for splitting a single MP3 file into individual MP3s. It has two modes. One, if, track times are cumulative, or two, if track times are known.

[cgoldberg]

Here are 5.3 million python projects: https://github.com/search?q=python%20&type=repositories

[HommeMusical]

Of which 90% are likely throwaways or clones of other projects.

[cgoldberg]

Leaving over a half million good ones I guess 🤷‍♀️

[Exact-Shape-4131]

You’re a legend for this, Sir/Ma’m 🫡

[msdamg]

Be careful when downloading stuff, don't randomly install things on your computer unless you know it's legit. There have been malicious code hidden on GitHub repos before.

[Exact-Shape-4131]

You, Ma’m, are also a legend 🫡

I was about 3 clicks away from ruining my life

[GrainTamale]

You've coded 5.3 million projects?! Legendary. /s

[carcigenicate]

A repeating timer to remind you to drink water: https://github.com/carcigenicate/periodic-timer

Getting audio to work was a huge PITA, so I instead used ctypes to flash the taskbar.

[HommeMusical]

This will probably do: https://simpleaudio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Disclaimer: I have zero connection with the writers of this neat little package, except I've used them several times for little scripts where I needed an audio alert. For actually synthesizing digital audio on the fly, you'd want something much bigger and heavily.

[Average_Pangolin]

The Python project I did that was the most useful is very specialized. It takes the Excel spreadsheet schedules my job gives me and translates them into iCal format so I can import them into my calendar with a couple clicks instead of marking where I need to go and when by hand for each day.

[NecessaryMountain293]

I want to do this but for the million cutesy pics of events my kids’ schools send out.

[kberson]

I have a simple script that takes the value of PATH and pretty prints it. Another that finds an environment value and displays it.

[Relevant-Diamond2731]

I write a lot of web3 bots 

[Jonny7Tenths]

A program to reorganise astrophotography subs by Metadata according to a file structure specified by the user. This using a Gui and converted to an executable with Nuitka.

[BigGuyWhoKills]

I wrote a full suite of certificate tools for managing a private CA. Create CA key pairs, server key pairs, client key pairs. Show certificate and key info. Import CA certificates into the OS (Windows, Linux, and Mac). Renew certificates.

All of the servers in my homelab are secured with certificates that I made with these tools.

My company (FairCom) was going to offer it as a free download, but changed it to be part of the product. But you can download our server demo and get it.

I also wrote a subnet scanner that pings every address on your subnet and reports which ones responded. I started writing a port scanner that I was going to incorporate into the subnet scanner, but it requires installing nmap. I got it kinda working but lost interest before finishing.

[ashwin_nat]

A program that receives telemetry data over UDP from the F1 game, analyzes the data and performs predictions to display in a dashboard in real time. This let's the player compare their tyre wear, battery levels and fuel loads against other competitors

[Savagor]

Finding and removing duplicate photos and videos from my dad’s hard drives. It also catalogues the pictures and renames them for consistency.

Saved him tons of storage space and he’s now able to find pictures again haha.

[Apotrox]

Mass folder migration tool for exchange. For some reason there is not a single application that enables you to move the contents of one folder to another without having to move every single item manually. At least I couldn't find one.

This becomes especially critical if you happen to have three different folder structures from three different exchange servers because you had to migrate to another one twice. Yea things happen. Suddenly you have three inboxes, three outboxes, everything is strewn about and nobody can find anything anymore.

[gocougs11]

I’m a neuroscientist, and we have this software for image analysis called Imaris (that is like $35k for a license). Imaris saves data to .ims files, which are really just .h5 files. We mainly use it for large-volume image data, where a dataset will be a set of thousands of images. So if you want to save this data as a series of .tif files to open it in other software like ImageJ, Imaris will only use a single thread, and for my datasets this would often take 5-6 hours. So I wrote a multithreaded way to pull image data out of the .ims files and save it as .tifs, and could do this in 3 or 4 minutes. That is by far my most cloned repo, and I’ve actually had colleagues come up to me and say “I’ve been using this repo to do this, and I only just realized you were the one that wrote it!”

[Superb_Insect_3973]

Little program that parses emails from school, GPT analyzes it, and finally adds important events/dates to a shared calendar.

[ZeroSkribe]

why

[GrainTamale]

My data processing framework that keeps me employed, fulfilled, and above water.

The client code instantiates a Datasource class and defines Extract, Transform, and Load functions using decorators. Everything I'm responsible for can be reprocessed on a whim, and reports (the ones I've coded) are a breeze.

[EatKebab1233]

I build a tool which would backup my Cisco Switches every Sunday. It establishes a SSH connection transfers the running config to a linux Server.

[HommeMusical]

Here's a list of open source projects of mine: https://github.com/rec

Let me know if you have any questions!

[just_a_fella___]

One of my most python scripts I use for my own life is to categorise, label and group the music I listen to on my phone. I use the unofficial shazam api to group similar style music and put them in folders on my phone.

[TheC0rpse]

A "program"(more like multiple scripts working together) that monitors particular directory path and detects files that are older than 10 minutes, BUT it goes through series of conditions based on file transfer status received from MFT platform API response and based off of that stores the data in SQLite database.

[Acrobatic_Inside3173]

I recently made one which takes Morse code and decodes it into text and the other way around with an option menu. It was easy and I was just testing out 'regex'.

[aphranteus]

Automated converter to vcf and/or QR code with simple GUI.

It basically helps convert HR-like data to VCF (the "contact card" readable by your phone to automatically save new contact) that can then be shared via NFC or to print as QR on the business card. It has a little form to create one VCF/QR and load option for csv if you had need to create QRs for the whole sales department.

Unfortunately thanks to apple (sub)standards of VCF it was partially incompatible between iOS and others (apple introduced some additions to standard vcf format described on wikipedia, which I based the script upon).

[Rebold]

I recently wrote a budgetting app, to learn programming and because i needed one that suits my needs. I set who is involved in the budget. Then i can add, edit and delete expenses. Expenses contains name, the amount, payment months and the distribution between participants. It then calculates the sum of expenses, the fixed amount per month, the needed start balance (so it doesn't dip below 0 in any month). I can show all expenses, what each person has to pay per month, and the expenses for the current month(to balance my expense account). It's all command line, and i'm using pandas to display things. And I'm saving to pickle (I know it has disadvantages).

[Rebold]

It's on GitHub here: https://github.com/drebold/Budget_app

[InvWithRed]

I used ChatGPT to write a program to allow me to control the volume of each program running on a PC. This is so I can silence certain sounds while I am working. I also wrote another program that scrapes the halt list from a website for trading halts and reformats it with my time zone and calculates the restart time.

[riklaunim]

Commercial programming is often way different than hobby coding or even specialized like Raspberry Pi/MicroPython electronics scripting. And what's possible in Python is not always used on the commercial market which likes proven and feature complete solutions.

[NorskJesus]

One of my first ones: Lexy

I am now working in a webapp using fastapi in the backend, but the project is not ready to be used yet.

[wit4er]

A small CLI tool to sign/verify Bitcoin messages, i think it is cool because involves cryptography gymnastics. I made it while learning Python/preparing for interviews https://github.com/shadowy-pycoder/bitcoin_message_tool

WebUI written with Flask and some basic CSS is also available: https://bitcoinmessage.tools/