From Script to Production: What Python Tutorials Don’t Teach
You've finished the tutorial. You've built the to-do app, understood list comprehensions, and maybe even trained a small machine learning model. You feel good. You feel ready. Then you try to take your script and actually deploy it somewhere — and it falls apart. This is the gap that almost nobody talks about. Python tutorials are great at teaching the language. They're terrible at teaching what it actually means to write production-grade software. Here's what they skip. 1. Environment Management Is Non-Negotiable Tutorials tell you to run pip install requests. They rarely explain why this is a catastrophic habit in the real world. When you install packages globally, you're on a collision course. Project A needs numpy 1.21. Project B needs numpy 1.26. Your system can only hold one. Now add a production server running five different services, and you have a nightmare. The answer is virtual environments — isolated Python installations per project. Tools lik...