Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: What can you build with Python?
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:00
Let's take just a moment and talk about what you can build with Python. Maybe you're having a debate with your engineering team
0:08
about whether you should choose Python or ASP.NET or Java or Go or whatever, and I think it's really important to have comparisons.
0:17
You can point out other amazing web apps out there that are probably doing way more traffic way more better performing and so on
0:25
than what you're going to need that are also built in Python, and that gives you really great talking
0:30
point for discussing what framework you should use and whether or not you should use Python. Of course, I think you should. It's amazing.
0:38
But, let's talk about some things built with Python. The Onion. Maybe you're heard of The Onion. This is like a fake news comedy site.
0:46
They make purposefully fake news that is hilarious. Really really love checking them out. They're quite funny to read. Built in Python.
0:54
Spotify, their web app and some backend services. Built in Python. Pretty awesome, great music service there.
1:01
NASA, they build so many amazing space things. They're working on sending people back to the moon which I think is pretty awesome, and they had a cool
1:11
video showing all the technology and stuff that they're using, and they had one bit of code. Know what that code was? Yeah, that's right. Was Python.
1:20
Bitly, the URL shortening service. You know bitly.com/whatever. So you can shorten these URLs, do a whole bunch
1:28
of analytics and analysis and statistics around it? Built by Python, of course. Bit Bucket. Competitor to Get Hooked.
1:35
They also do things like Jira and so on. So, Bit Bucket is a social control, collaboration and issue tracking site. Very very popular.
1:45
You knew it. Python. Survey Monkey. Python. Quora, what I think is one of the best online Q&A forums for deep, usually deep and thoughtful answers.
1:56
Really nice, love it, these guys are super passionate about their work with Python. Of course, the site's built with Python.
2:02
But they do even more than that. They have an engineering BLOG where they talk about cool things they've done in trying to make their apps
2:08
and their website run better, and tweaking Python and trying to understand it better. So that's super cool.
2:14
Disqus, the little comments section you can embed at the end of your BLOG or the end of web pages. They've talked a lot about their use of Python
2:22
and they're doing quite a bit of traffic. Python of course. Instagram, another super passionate set of users around Python.
2:30
Their web app and services use Python and they handle a ton of traffic so they gave a great keynote at Pycon 2017 about
2:39
migrating from Python 2 to Python 3, and Django. Onto the latest version of Django doing some really
2:44
cool tricks. They've done some unusual things, like they've disabled garbage collection, and just recycle their
2:50
worker processes every 12 hours or something to actually get pretty significant improvements in memory usage and performance.
2:58
They do a bunch of cool stuff with Python and they actually BLOG a lot about it as well which is great.
3:03
Reddit, the front page of the Internet, as some say. Built on Python and SQLAlchemy. It's interesting they use a SQLAlchemy core
3:11
which we'll talk a little bit about as well as Python for their site. YouTube, I already discussed them earlier.
3:16
They handle millions of requests per second. Built on Python. Pretty great. The brand new freshly relaunched pypi.org Python package index site?
3:27
Built with Python, of course, but they handle an incredible amount of traffic, and really interesting piece of infrastructure.
3:34
Built with Python. Pinterest. Python. Paypal. Paypal does a lot with Python. They have some internal services
3:42
microservice type things that work together and there's one built in Python that's super interesting.
3:47
It's like this pricing exchange service, and a whole bunch of other parts of the site, and the apps and stuff
3:54
all need to talk to each other, talk to the service to figure out what is the fractional rate I'm going to charge for this thing or that, and so on.
4:01
And that service gets several billion requests per day with either millisecond or sub millisecond response time written in Python. Pretty awesome.
4:12
Drop Box. Huge users of Python. The creator of Python, Guido van Rossum, works there as well as some other core developers.
4:18
They have over a million lines of Python code, actually. The little client side app that you get is even Python
4:24
which is quite unusual, as well as a lot of their backend services, so a very big center of the universe at Python.
4:30
And they just talked about converting all their code over to Python 3, using mypy as well which is a pretty interesting engineering story.
4:37
So of course, Drop Box is all in on Python, and us. You bet that we're all in on Python as well. All of our infrastructure and whatnot is built
4:46
in Python and has been so super successful so we're very very happy, big advocates of Python web app because they've worked out so well for us.
4:56
Now let's use a little Python to actually tell you more about this. So if you want to read more about any of these except for my site, I guess.
5:03
It's not listed there. But all the other uses we're talking about here you can go to bitly/pyapp-25 and it'll take you to this article that highlights
5:12
not just all of these users of Python but it exactly how they're using it. That's good company to be in, I would say.