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Discussion on: The forges behind Netflix, LinkedIn and Co.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

Didn't know about Robinhood at all, I see they released a stream processing library in Python, neat! They've also had half a billion dollars (!!!) in funding, that buys you a lot of time and space to dedicate full time resources to open source (as in having full time employees working mostly on those libraries and frameworks).

For some reason I didn't even know Next and Hyper were from Zeit.

I wonder what's the story behind all of these released tools. How they started, how they got here, why they decided to open source them and so on.

BTW what is it with fintech companies and Python? :-D

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I could have probably picked any company, but Robinhood popped into my mind as a software-based company with a lot of momentum but not so big the whole world has heard of them.

On Zeit: dev.to/changelog/213-zeit-hyperter...

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kaelscion profile image
kaelscion

As a Python dev I can say that it’s popular with fintech most likely because it is one of the big players in data science right now, but also has great support for building for the web and REST APIs with DRF, Flask, Respnder, etc. I’m not, by any means saying, that Python is the best at any of these things. However, it is a great all-rounder that allows companies to use the same stack to rapidly go from idea to prototype to launch on all fronts. SciKit, Numpy, Pandas, SQLAlchemy or Django ORM, and a plethora of web scraping and data aggregation tools to do you “money stuff”. The. Use the same language to build the API and/or web app to serve it all to customers.

A decent team can make this happen very quickly due to Python’s ease of use and you’ve got a decent chance of launching before somebody can steal your idea and launch before you which, I imagine, is a big deal where financial tech is involved. Not sure if those are the absolute reasons, but that’s why I personally believe it is so popular with data-driven and financial companies right now.

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

As a Python dev I can say that it’s popular with fintech most likely because it is one of the big players in data science right now

Eh eh I was half joking. A decade ago at my very first job they were doing data science in fintech, in Python (nobody knew it was called data science nor fintech :D). There's a long history of Python as a favorite tool in academia and science, and it is really easy to integrate with C and C++, and lots of numerical libraries where. Also, Boost Python was in vogue.

Not sure if those are the absolute reasons, but that’s why I personally believe it is so popular with data-driven and financial companies right now.

Yeah, rapid prototyping and the fact it can scale with the company (and be even replaced when there's need to) is one of the reasons why people like Python. The enourmous amount of tools is another.

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kaelscion profile image
kaelscion

Whoops! Sorry. Took that just a trifle too literally. Ma bad!!

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Don't be sorry, I learned something 😂

Python is still my go to language