Summary
Adopting Python across a company brings extra agility and productivity not provided by traditional mainstream tools like Excel. This is the story of programmers teaching non-programmers, from different departments, to embrace Python in their daily work.
Description
By introducing ipython notebook, pandas and the other data analysis packages that make python even more accessible and attractive, we attempted to adapt python as a core technology across our whole company. We’ve challenged the dominant position of Microsoft Excel and similar tools, and dared to replace it by pandas-powered ipython notebooks.
During this transitional phase, we have been inspired and sometimes forced to develop multiple packages that extend pandas, numpy etc., in order to enable our colleagues, in other departments, to access all the data they need. Moreover, we are developing several high level functionalities for the notebook environment.
The notebook environment is allowing us to be extremely responsive to the changes our users are asking for, since, for part of the work, we don’t have to go through the whole traditional development process.
The talk focuses on challenges and problems we’ve solved and managed in order to achieve our long term goal of creating highly agile, data-driven non-tech teams, free from the constraints imposed by mainstream technologies, and all of this thanks to python.