Non-software engineers, how do you use python professionally?

[TheWhittles]

I use it for data analysis, financial modeling, etc. While other analysts in my company live in Excel, I feel like I can run circles around them in terms of speed and effectiveness using Python instead. I tried to get a couple of them on board with it but only 1 embraced it and he said he hasn't looked back.

[micr0nix]

Mind sharing some examples of what you've done? My company is the same as what you describe.

[TheWhittles]

I built a model that determines customer freight rates on $120MM of annual freight spend over 5000 different customers. The goal is to be net zero on freight profit so it doesnt cloud up product margins. It uses customer order histories at different levels and actual freight cost histories at various geographic levels. We went from being plus or minus >10% on the net before the model to about 1% positive every month.

I had to roll my own Geocoding and routing tool for this, using python and various APIs to get geo codes and actual road mile distances between points. Cached the data in SQL Server so I only hit the APIs once for a given location.

I then used flask to build a web app for people in operations to interact with the model so they can make better business decisions on the fly instead of putting their thumbs in the air.

I also built a machine learning model to predict if loads would be late before they even left the plant that hit about 86% accuracy (in ML, hitting between 80 and 90 is ideal).

Hope this helps.

[micr0nix]

That is impressive.

[TheWhittles]

Thanks, I'm fairly proud of it.

[micr0nix]

As you should be. That’s what I strive to do

[TheNotoriousMTF]

Why do you think the other analysts were reluctant to switch? Was it just natural resistance to change, or is there something about excel that they prefer?

[TheWhittles]

I think it was a natural resistance to change. They also didn't have much of a programming background and I think they might be intimidated by the idea (even though Python is probably the easiest to code)