I understand Python gets some mileage in the financial industry, particularly by quant/analyst types. I'm aware that NumPy and matplotlib see a lot of action -

I understand Python gets some mileage in the financial industry, particularly by quant/analyst types. I'm aware that NumPy and matplotlib see a lot of action - are there other open source packages that get a lot of traction? Are there contributions from companies that find their way back into the larger open source ecosystem? I came to suggest that as an aid to your learning you could focus your attention on using, evaluating, and writing Python packages related to finance. There doesn't seem to be a lot out there: http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=finance&submit=search http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=financ... Examining packages like this where you already have a handle on what the code is supposed to be doing might be a good way to consume a lot of (hopefully some good, and probably a lot of not so good) Python code. Regardless of if you find a local mentor, contributing to or writing your own open source packages should prove to be a very valuable experience. Perhaps you could even start a package or set of general packages related to finance. Sort of like what SciPy is to NumPy. (FiPy?)