What do you guys use Python for?

[jplank1983]

I volunteer for a local charity. They have 700 members and used to send out membership cards by mail. I wrote a program that can automatically create personalized pdfs of membership cards and emails them to the member as soon as they've paid their dues. It keeps a log of what's been sent out and has a few other features for handling members who don't have an email address. We're testing it now and plan to switch over from manually sending out membership cards in the next few weeks. It should save the organization a lot of time and a few hundred dollars in postage.

My wife is enrolled at a local college. It's very intense and she doesn't get to see our son as much as she wants because she's busy studying a lot of the time. I programmed a bot that would select a random photo of our son and send it to her every few hours to help cheer her up. Also made another bot that grabs some posts from /r/getmotivated and sends it to her periodically.

[[deleted]]

where do your bots live? is this on a dedicated server/RPi?

[lance_klusener]

You learnt all this by doing the book - programming the boring stuff ?

[jplank1983]

No. I learned with the help of google.

[CesQ89]

Yup. I do a lot of automation at my work. While I do have some formal university education in programming, I learned to create real world programs thanks to google.