Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: What can you build with Python
Lecture: The types of software you can build
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In this chapter we're going to focus on two important things which I think are very important to deciding is Python
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the right thing for you and does it fit for your use case. The first one is what type of applications is Python really good at building?
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Websites, API's, things like that. Is it good for it? We're going to find out. The other one is who uses Python and how do they use it?
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I think a really important case when you're thinking about is this technology for me? If someone in your industry is being very successful
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with a technology, well, that probably should tell you. Maybe we can make that work for you as well. So, I'm going to show you a bunch of use cases
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of really interesting and well known companies doing cool stuff with Python. Let's start with what you can build.
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I mentioned websites, I said that YouTube was written in Python. Also, Instagram and a bunch of other things.
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So, building websites in Python, there are many many different web frameworks. We're actually going to focus a little bit on that in this course.
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But yes, you can definitely, definitely build websites with Python. In fact, the Talk Python Training website
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would it surprise you to hear that it's built in Python? And it's fast, isn't it? It's faster than most of the sites out there.
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So, yeah. Python's pretty awesome for that. Related to that are web services, HTTP API's, JSON. So, if you need to build some way for applications
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to interact with your code rather than humans through a browser, then API's are the way to go. In fact, at Talk Python Training we have mobile apps
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for taking our courses both in IOS and Android and those applications do all sorts of communication back to the server to get the videos, to figure out
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what courses you have, to get the transcripts to show and things like that. All of those are, of course, written in Python
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and they work really really well. So, if you need to build API's, there are many many options, as we'll see. Data science is a huge part of Python.
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We've already talked about the incredible growth of Python and how the folks coming from data science are finding
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it very welcoming cause it's a full spectrum language. So, many of the things in the data science world
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were Python first and they start making their ways to other areas. Think of iPython notebooks, maybe you've heard of Jupyter and Jupyter Lab.
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This is a really cool interactive way to explore data that works with many languages. It started out as iPython notebooks in the Python space.
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So, of course data science is really really rich and powerful and Python. Related to that is machine learning and AI
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image recognition, deep learning, all those types of things. Most of the libraries that do deep learning or machine learning are Python first.
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Yeah, they might work with other languages. But, usually when these are designed, they're designed first to be consumed from Python and then other ways
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of working with them. Maybe a C++ API or a Java API is built in. But if you're doing some sort of machine learning
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it's extremely unlikely that you can not do that well with Python. Robotics. Python is very powerful for building and controlling robots.
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Python is used to automate factories and build all sorts of amazing things. Also, control little, smaller robots.
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So if you do anything with robotics, you can use things like the ROS Operating System and work with that in Python.
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Dev Ops. Do you have a bunch of servers or a cloud infrastructure you need to manage? You can use awesome things like Ansible or even
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through libraries such as Paramiko. You can issue arbitrary SSH commands to remote servers all over the place.
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So, in the Dev Ops world and infrastructure as code Hardware as code, Python is a really important player there.
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So, if you're doing something Excel-like. Putting a bunch of data into Excel and I'm doing a few calculations and I'm making a graph and so on
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there's actually a ton of functionality in Python in associated libraries either for directly automating Excel
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or working in similar ways, but better than Excel does. There's actually an interesting Talk Python episode that I did called Escaping Excel Hell.
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You can find it at talkpython.fm/200 and it talks about one, how to automate Excel. And two, what are the libraries that are
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as programmatic equivalent of working with Excel. And if you find you're doing a bunch of stuff with excel for your business, chances are
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you're kind of reaching the limits of it or it's getting challenging. Python doesn't have those limits.
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All right, so this is just a taste of what you can build with Python. All the stuff on the screen here, it's very very good at these things.
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So, if these are what you need to do, these types of apps or these types of capabilities. Well, you're on the right track with Python.