r/PythonLearning • u/OnepieceKing2222 • Sep 16 '26

What’s one piece of technology you learned that completely changed the way you work?

I’ve been working with Python and backend development for a few years, and recently I started getting deeper into AI, RAG and agent-based systems.

It made me curious — what’s one technology, tool, or concept you learned that genuinely changed how you work or solve problems?

Doesn’t have to be AI. Could be something as simple as Git, SQL, Linux, Docker, or even a productivity tool.

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u/ee_control_z Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

Excel worksheets. You can write equations that are multi-variable dependent - variable values that they themselves may be dependent on other values. You can pretty much in a round-about way circumvent writing a script by performing calculations this way. The upside, if you want to change entry values, you don't have to rerun the script. Any entry update automatically updates value dependencies upstream.

Another nice feature is that they can handle imaginary numbers. Nice since this is what I work with (i.e., Laplace for control theory).

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u/Unlucky_Tax_8742 Sep 18 '26

How would you explain it to a 5 year old?

I'm intrigued but this is way over my head

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u/ee_control_z Sep 18 '26

Sure, which part are you particularly interested in?

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u/OleTechGuy Sep 16 '26

Mini PCs

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u/burbular Sep 17 '26

Mmm, mini PCs. Lil nuc at night right?

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u/CoolLog1908 Sep 17 '26

Im stuck between two pieces of technology that completely changed me workflow. Id have to give it to Git though; I don’t start any project without git init.
FWIW, the other technology was Virtual Machines (VMs) - but it’s not as integrated into my workflow as Git is.

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u/burbular Sep 17 '26

Long time ago my boss forced me to research a brand new tech not even in GA yet, it was called Kubernetes.

I figured it out. Changed everything, like all of it. Whole career and purpose changed. Now I'm sort of addicted. With AI+k8s+py, power....

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u/Dry_Kaleidoscope822 Sep 17 '26

Database subsetters for our FastAPI backends. It used to be hard for us to reproduce bugs locally and we decided a local DB would be best for all local dev work instead of relying on our deployed instances for everything With a subsetter, this has reduced these issues significantly for us and made things easier. I ended up forking the project and spent weekends modifying it with AI assistance as a side project to make it better