The most important Python script I ever wrote

The story of my first and most important automation script, plus an example of what it would look like now.

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If you are new, welcome. I'm John, a self taught Python developer working in the web and data space. I specialize in data extraction and automation. If you like programming and web content as much as I do, you can subscribe for weekly content.

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➡ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Story
03:21 Code Start

[martyc]

Not Python- but I automated a task using VBA in the first few weeks of my current role that I have no doubt was the reason they couldn’t keep someone in my role for more than a few weeks before they ran for the hills. Still using it most days and it literally saves me 20 hours a week.

[mgaugy]

"Automate Everything":
1. Automate task A
2. Automate task B
3. Automate execution for task automation of A and B
4. Find a way to automate the automation in step 3
5. Keep building the automation tree

[ankushgaur]

Same story 🙂 Python automation has also helmed me make new friends in every department in the company. Your channel is great. Thank you.

[BreetaiZentradi]

At a job I had, one of the more important clerical staff lost 4 hours a week, comparing Folder A to Folder B, and Folder B to Folder C, and noting what had changed with what folders were added, or moved. I wrote a script that would daily create a directory listing, DIFF with yesterdays listing, produce a report of ADDs, MOVEs and DELETEs and email it to them daily, then make today's listing "yesterdays listing" for the next run. This saved them 4 wasted work weeks a year. In addition they had the changes daily now instead of weekly. Once that was available it turned out there were 7 or 8 other people who benefited from this information. I just changed the program to email them all. It is amazing how one little script can save so much time.

[alishagrace]

Python is awesome.

I automated a task with Python that was repetitive, that took about an hour every time. Now instead of me creating multiple CSV files from one large file with Excel manually (Excel struggles with a lot of data), Python does it with the run of a command in just a second.

[MustafaAli-vevm]

Same experience, I used to work as a Data Entry Officer at an e-commerce company (nothing fancy here) but I can't stress this enough, 60% to 70% even till 80% of my tasks can be automated from changing product price, disabling it, adding promoted price for certain duration, changing its status to in/out of stock, changing product's description with a pre-defined description based on a given google sheet. Imagine doing this manually for 100+ of products, no thanks! I even helped our brand managers by fetching 100+ of production information from other vendors and competitors.

[capability-snob]

input() is a nice alternative to sleep you may like - it waits until you press enter in the shell, so you can wait as little or as much as you like.

[BanAaron]

During COVID my usual work wasn't required any more but my job didn't want to just let go on furlough (grrrr) so I was giving the task of RDPing onto every server we had to copy files from a folder onto the main server for processing. We had many many servers that were incredibly slow so this would take 4 hours a day of mind numbing boringness

I completely automated this task with Python and it took 10ish minutes to run. I even went further and used multiprocessing to kick off the moves on each server concurrently which took it down to 2~3 minutes

[deeperblue]

Nice one and fascinating. While I was working on a tedious, repetitive task, I started looking into Python. I had a little experience with C#, but it just did not feel right, and Python was simple to adapt. I've never been regretting my Python journey since.

[ffx]

Well, that was such a cool and informative video that I had to leave a comment to help your YouTube algorithm. Well done :)

[sharkysharkerson]

Companies underestimate the power of tools and scripts when they look at productivity. Features and bugs are given priority whereas they tend to kick the can when you want to schedule time for tools, and the only time they get written is when someone carves out their own time to work on them while also hitting their other milestones. At the same time, tools are the things that can realistically achieve 10x or higher magnitudes of performance improvements, if you consider the amount of time everyone has to spend doing things manually all the time across the company.

[MichaelWyattMDW]

I DIDN'T KNOW YOU COULD DO THIS!!! I mean... now that I think about it, I knew there were -programs- that did this... like Q&A testing type packages. This looks relatively simple, though!!! I had no idea! This is great! I also have a weekly thing I have to do for work that is tedious, and I've been thinking it could be scripted... but just assumed that would be way over my head. This will definitely help me get started! Thank you so much for posting this! (So glad it shows up on my feed!)

[BrownStain_Silver]

I'm just finishing up Automate the Boring Stuff now. I've been writing some programs for work as well. I'm a few months in and it's a lot of fun. So far i've automated a few work processes. The most meaningful one is reduce a potentially 30+ hour task to hitting run on a program, providing 3 user response, and a 2-5 minute wait.

[onage]

Same here 👏 In my case I had to copy-paste social media data into a clunky spreadsheet. I started with some simple Python scripts to automate whatever I could, ended up in love with programming and am currently building large-scale analytics apps for my company. Your channel has been huge help throughout the years! Thank you 🙏

[dmcf]

Great example and helps inspire ideas for me.

[adventurefilms]

What resource did you come across at 1:03? Apologies, the title and author all ran together.

[thomaspetermygind]

Came for the hope of automating parts of my work. Stayed for the CS talk!

[shaftymaze]

You changed my life. Only your videos. No joke.

[markuswierer]

As a person who doesn't understand much about coding: is having your username and password openly in a script the norm?
It kinda... "feels" wrong...

I assume you could make those two things an interactive prompt to type in everytime you start the program instead of having it written in the code permanently.

But that won't help much if it is scheduled to run automatically at certain times without user interaction...

Again, I don't understand much about programming, so I'm curious if that is a security concern in the "real world"?

[divyanshugogna]

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and story John.

In my case main python use in my life was also webscrapping from Amazon to find deals.

I have improved a lot in my code and generally over time with lots of learning sources

Would appreciate some content about automation of these python scripts please ?
And may be dynamic content too (where one code runs other code, or passes data to other code at a dynamic time)