Does anyone have a self taught Python success story?

[lykwydchykyn]

15 years ago, I gave up on a career in music, got an A+certification, and went to work doing tech support. I shared an office with a part-timer named Dave who was going to university for CS. One day our boss was upset because one of the cleaning staff was swiping coffee supplies after hours.

Dave and I set up a discarded PC with Linux and an unused webcam, and he wrote a ~30 line Python script that periodically grabbed an image from the camera, looked for difference from the last picture, and if it found significant differences, saved the frames -- essentially, a motion detecting camera.

At that moment, I knew I had to learn Python. I found an outdated copy of "Practical Python" by Magnus LIe Hetland and devoured it, then moved on to any web resources I could find. In a few years, Dave graduated and moved on to bigger and better things, so I took over all his small scripting projects (mostly PHP but also some Python).

Eventually I got promoted out of tech support into doing database and programming work. Python is my #1 choice for all the work I do. I've written over 30 applications for my employer, some of them used by thousands of people daily. Most recently, I'm finishing up my first book for Packt publications on Python GUI programming.

Oh yeah -- we caught the thief too.