I learned a little bit of python back in college with the hope that it would give me a competitive edge in the field I hoped to enter. Lo and behold, I got a job in a different industry entirely and any knowledge of coding I once had became irrelevant.
Would it be worth it to pick up my python textbook again and self-teach in my free time if I don’t want to make a career of coding? What exactly can python be used to create?
If your computer can theoretically do something, you can probably make that happen using Python. Most people don’t use Python to make their own software, though. Rather, they use it to automate tasks by gluing together software made by other people.
If automating stuff sounds useful or appealing to you, then yeah, learn you a Python. If that sounds like a waste of time… well, why learn something you won’t use? There’s certainly a joy to be had to the learning itself and there’s plenty to be said about how it may broaden your own thinking, but these are intrinsic rewards you can only discover for yourself.
Programming can be used to automate yourself out of your job if you are interested in helping your employer generate value for shareholders
On a personal level, it can also help make your job more interesting by automating tedious tasks, freeing up more space to do actually useful stufd.
Better yet, automate the boring stuff, never tell your boss and enjoy a stress free day to find some other job that isn’t so pointless.
I would argue it’s worth having at least a passing knowledge of how Python works. It is a very simple yet powerful language that is used for a lot of applications.
Personally, I’ve utilized it at work to process data for reports that I would otherwise be doing in spreadsheets by hand. If you learn how to import .csv files, manipulate rows of data, and export back to a new .csv file then you will probably eventually find a use in any office you end up working at.
As a hobby, if you have any interest in AI art or AI large language model projects then knowing some basic python will be a huge help. Most of the open-source projects and their extensions use Python, and there are many times I’ve tried to use a GitHub tool but gotten an error. Knowing Python, I am able to track down and fix small issues about 80% of the time, which feels pretty cool.
Finally, even if you don’t get much/any use out of Python, it’s probably worth learning just so you understand how scripts, imported libraries, and basic programming logic works. Just having that baseline understanding will make you look like a rockstar when dealing with a companies proprietary software in many office settings.
I’m still very new at Python but would it be possible to use it to automate updating Excel from a company website (sorta like JIRA or Projects) and vice versa?
I don’t use JIRA myself, but after a brief search it looks like you can use the JIRA Python library or pull data directly from the REST api fairly easily. I know there are several libraries and methods to interact with Excel using Python, so I am fairly confident your user case would be doable with some scripting.
The userbase of Python is so large that for almost anything you might want to do it’s likely someone else has already worked out a solution and created a library for it. For everything else, you can make your own solution and share it for the next person with that same problem.
I would check out the online free book How to Automate the Boring Stuff with Python it gave a lot of ideas for little scripts that can save me time (not hours usually, but about an hour over time so far) such as my script for organizing my downloads folder based on the file extension.
