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The 7 Python Hacks Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know
(How I used tiny snippets of code to automate away weeks of repetitive work)
I’ll let you in on a secret. Most of the magic you see at big tech companies — the endless dashboards, the daily automation, the instant pipelines — doesn’t come from massive codebases or genius-level complexity. A lot of it is built on surprisingly simple Python tricks. The difference is, they know how to wield them at scale.
In this article, I’ll show you 7 Python hacks that I’ve used (and seen used at the top levels of the industry) to save days of work. Each one is practical, battle-tested, and designed to help you automate something today. You won’t find “print(f”Hello”) tricks here. Instead, you’ll get real automation insights — the kind that makes other developers lean over and whisper, “Wait, you can do that?”
Automating File Cleanup Like a Pro
Raise your hand if your downloads folder is a crime scene. Mine used to look like a digital landfill. PDFs, images, half-baked scripts… everything thrown together. Then I wrote a simple Python script that quietly cleans it every midnight.
import os, shutil, time
downloads = "/Users/ahad/Downloads"
destinations = {
".pdf": "/Users/ahad/Documents/PDFs",
".jpg": "/Users/ahad/Pictures",
".py"…
