Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: What can you build with Python
Lecture: Who uses Python?
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As I mentioned at the outset, knowing who in your industry is using Python can be a huge help in deciding whether
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it's right for you or helping influence your team or your manager about whether or not Python is a good fit.
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Let's talk about some really cool use cases. SpaceX, one of my favorite companies I can't believe what Elon Musk and those guys
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are doing around finally starting to deliver on what technology can do for space. Super, super cool. I love to see those things land.
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And you know what? They have over 92 open positions for Python developers at SpaceX. They're extremely secretive, so I haven't been able, yet
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to figure out what exactly they're doing with Python. But if they have over 92 positions, not just jobs but maybe multiple openings in a given position
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for Python, you can bet that they're making serious use of it to get us into space. Spotify, amazing radio music streaming service
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their website, built with Python. Pretty awesome. NASA, speaking of space, the other major space player.
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NASA put together this cool documentary on all the steps that were taken to get back to the moon. Man, I hope they really make that happen
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and it doesn't get canceled for whatever reason. They showed engineers doing cool stuff, people doing tests and astronauts and whatnot.
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In one of the sections they had in this promotional video was, and here are the software developers
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helping get us to space and writing the code to make this work. You know what they had on the screen? Of course it was Python.
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Bitly, if you need your URL shortened and you want to share them and you wanted to have analytics real-time, quick analytics around who's clicking
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and sharing your data, Bitly written in Python. Bitbucket, you've seen GitHub, Bitbucket is the other big competitor, maybe along with GitLab
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for that type of service. And Bitbucket is written in Python. JPMorgan Chase, maybe you're been thinking oh, all these other things are way out there.
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We're like a way boring insurance company in Iowa. Ain't nothing wrong with that but it's not SpaceX maybe so we don't get to use Python.
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We use Java, or I don't know, whatever. JPMorgan Chase has some of their most important systems written in Python.
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They have 35 million lines of Python code and Python is typically short compared to other programming languages
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in terms of lines of code to get something done. So that is a ton of Python they're using. Not listed here, but also a massive, massive user
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of Python is Bank of America. Quora, great Q&A site that you can go and ask deep questions. Or ask questions and get fairly deep answers
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so Quora, does it surprise you to know that they're written in Python? They're actually super passionate about Python.
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They have an engineering blog where they talk about all the ways they're using Python and customizing it and trying to squeeze more out of it.
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Super big users of Python. Disqus, if you've ever gone to like a blog or certain sites that have a discussion section at the bottom
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Disqus may well be powering that. There's all sorts of cool, real time web socket communication stuff going on there
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and much of what they're doing is Python. They've written about it. Instagram, Instagram may be the largest deployment
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of Django. I can't remember exactly but they're doing incredible stuff. They gave a keynote about how they're using
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Django at PyCon 2017, the biggest Python conference. And that's on YouTube. You can just search Instagram keynote PyCon and it'll come right up.
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Yeah, huge, huge users and supporters of Python. Reddit, the front page of the internet. Reddit is interesting in a couple of ways.
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They use Python, of course, to build their website and serve it up. They also use a cool library called SQLAlchemy.
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But what's even more interesting is you can actually find an open source version of the Reddit website out on the internet.
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It's an archive version, it's not live like the Flask GitHub repo that I showed you. But if you want to see what they did to build Reddit
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well, actually you can go get it. YouTube, already mentioned YouTube was written and still runs in Python, handling millions of requests per second.
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And that's a huge, huge scalability challenge that they're solving in Python and that's quite cool. The Python Package Index, we saw all the cool
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libraries that you can get there. Well, it's no surprise that would be written in Python is it? Pinterest, if you've ever gone to the Pinterest website
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or used their APIs, written in Python. PayPal, back to the financial space a little bit. PayPal has a service internally whose job it is
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to say what the exchange rate is in money or how much should we charge as a percentage of this transaction and that gets called billions of times a day
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and needs near millisecond response time. And they do that with Python. Dropbox, Dropbox is a huge user of Python.
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We talked about Guido van Rossum earlier. He actually worked for many years at Dropbox and just recently retired.
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It's time for him to do a little bit less corporate programming, but for a long time he was there at Dropbox doing cool stuff.
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Even the client side Dropbox app, the little thing in your menu bar, in your task bar that looks like this icon, that is distributed as an application
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as Python. And then of course all the back end stuff, Python. Super cool. Last but not least, Talk Python. Of course our websites are built in Python
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our APIs are built in Python and it's been working incredibly well for us for many, many years. And we have no intention to move away.
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We have no complaints, millions of requests terabytes of traffic, beautiful. Works like a charm.
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If you want to read more about how some of these companies are using Python, like Quora, Pinterest, Spotify
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and so on, you can check out this link below. There's actually an article that talks about a bunch
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of different sites, some of which I've highlighted here how they're actually using Python exactly. And then others, like SpaceX or JPMorgan Chase
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have just pulled together from other places. But here's a little bit of a reference for you. These are just a few of the companies using Python.
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It's a pretty diverse mix here and if it works for them, chances are it's probably going to work for you.