Salesforce Engineering puts Python to work across many areas of their business.
Read on to see how they use python in machine learning, security, internal devops teams and more.The Python programming language has strong ties to both engineering and science disciplines, which gives its users access to a wide number of libraries to solve both practical and theoretical problems. We put it to work across Salesforce.org (our non-profit product arm), Heroku, Salesforce Einstein, Industries and Service Clouds, internal devops teams, and more.
Here are 6 things we use Python to do (and you can too!) through projects we’ve open sourced:
1. Conquer the Natural Language Decathlon by performing ten disparate natural language tasks (DecaNLP).
Deep learning has significantly improved state-of-the-art performance for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but each one is typically studied in isolation. The Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP) is a new benchmark for studying general NLP models that can perform a variety of complex, natural language tasks. By requiring a single system to perform ten disparate natural language tasks, decaNLP offers a unique setting for multitask, transfer, and continual learning.
2. Create SSL/TLS client fingerprints that are easy to produce on any platform and can be easily shared for threat intelligence (JA3).
JA3 gathers the decimal values of the bytes for the following fields in the Client Hello packet; SSL Version, Accepted Ciphers, List of Extensions, Elliptic Curves, and Elliptic Curve Formats. It then concatenates those values together in order, using a “,” to delimit each field and a “-” to delimit each value in each field.
3. Use Google Sheets like tables in code (pygsheetsorm).
Ever wanted to be able to use a Google Sheet like a table in your code? How about if you could get a list of objects that automatically mapped column headers into properties? Then this project is for you! This is a simple interface on top of pygsheets.
4. Get rid of silent errors in Perforce syncs (o4).
At Salesforce, we use Perforce at a very large scale. A scale that exposes some shortcomings in p4 itself. o4 was created to improve reliability of a sync and increase scalability in our very large-scale CI. What that boils down to is the rather horrendous reality that a p4 sync makes most of the changes to your local files. o4 allows you to continue using Perforce and all the associated tools and IDE plugins, without the uncertainty around a sync. Every sync is guaranteed perfect, every single time. In the rare occurrence that a sync could not be met to 100%, o4 will fail loudly. Crash and burn. No more silent errors! In addition to that, o4 allows some dramatic improvements to CI.
5. Automatically verify, de-duplicate, and suggest payouts for vulnerability reports through HackerOne (AutoTriageBot).
This bot can automatically verify reports about XSS, SQLi, and Open Redirect vulnerabilities (via both GET and POST). In addition, it is built in a modular manner so that it can be easily expanded to add tests for other classes of vulnerabilities.
6. Run continuous integration from the command line for Salesforce Managed Package applications (CumulusCI).
Out of the box, CumulusCI provides a complete best practice development and release process based on the processes used by Salesforce.org to build and release managed packages to thousands of users. It offers a flexible and pluggable system for running tasks (single actions) and flows (sequences of tasks) and an OAuth-based org keychain allowing easy connection to Salesforce orgs and stored in local files using AES encryption.
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Still want more Python? Check out all of the Salesforce Open Source projects built in Python on GitHub.
WRITTEN BY
Laura Lindeman
Voracious reader & crafter of words. organizer extraordinaire. #peoplegeek at Salesforce on the Tech & Products Innovation & Learning team.
