In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, Python and React have emerged as pivotal technologies driving innovation and scalability in web and application development. Businesses increasingly rely on these frameworks to build robust and user-centric solutions.
Since 2008, leading tech universities in Costa Rica have adopted Python as the primary programming language for introductory courses. Additionally, from 2013-2014, U.S. companies operating in the country transitioned to ReactJS, creating a high demand for full-stack engineers proficient in these technologies, reaching in 2018 the amount of ~3400 Python and React developers. Costa Rica is a prime destination for sourcing top-tier tech talent. By the end of 2023, the U.S. government decided on a large investment package in Costa Rica to become its tech hub for software, medical devices manufacturing, and microchips.
Python and ReactJS have spread among the country's tech professionals rapidly for several important reasons:
- Ease of Learning: Python is one of the fastest and easiest languages to learn for any programmer. People can become productive with Python in about two weeks, and the code generated can be rapidly improved with the support of AI assistants such as Copilot.
- Versatility: ReactJS and its companion React Native allow for the development of both web and mobile interfaces, providing tremendous flexibility for creativity in user interaction. On the other hand, Python's open-source nature has enabled engineers to build a vast array of libraries and extensions capable of providing solutions for many industry needs, which will be covered in the next section of this article.
- Technical, Geographical, and Cultural Connection with the U.S.: This connection has driven a large portion of Costa Rican software engineers to specialize in these technologies, responding to national and international companies looking for highly talented individuals to address solutions with the same standards used in the U.S. This allows for full development in Costa Rica while also building multicultural teams across the world, with engineers ready to communicate effectively in all aspects.
Why python and react
65% of our recent projects have something to do with python or react
Since 2014, 65% of the projects developed by Akurey have involved Python or ReactJS. Both offer organizations and software engineers a vast set of libraries, frameworks, and tools for many areas and problems to solve. Here are a few examples:
- Healthcare Consumer Apps: Health facilities have deployed React apps for services such as drug dose monitoring, family care, orphan management, and bed facilities. These apps provide customized and smooth user experiences in mobile and web applications used daily by patients, family members, and facility managers. Simultaneously, these facilities benefit from robust and secure Python tools such as Flask, Django, and FastAPI for building backends, microservices, integrating with cloud services, and implementing HIPAA compliance, among other tasks.
- Payments and Loans: Robust tools and frameworks like Django enable the development of secure backends for integrations with PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and Plaid. These systems can connect users' bank accounts, implement KYC and KYT strategies, biometric authorizations, and open-source integrations with blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Cardano. We have also worked on loan pre-validation and scoring for two financial entities to assist executives.
- Retail and Healthcare Data Mining: Python libraries such as PySpark, NumPy, and Pandas are used to build data flows from clients' current systems, whether in retail branches or for medical data diagnosis. These data flows send information to decision-making data repositories, resulting in real savings in money and time. Effective data strategies are crucial not just for creating dashboards but for producing real changes in profit margins.
- Consulting and Actionable AI Assistants: Since 2022, our capabilities in Python for data analysis, API creation, and integration with many cloud systems, combined with the recent commercial availability of LLMs, have enabled us to build consulting tools integrated with Slack, WhatsApp, Meets, and legacy apps. These tools offer rapid responses to questions, procedures, policies, and compliances based on organizational data. Additionally, we detected a lack of APIs capable of transforming AI-supported assistance into actions such as API calls to other systems, notifications, or database transactions. This led to the development of our latest solution, Mainstay API, which customizes prompts and rules to trigger real actions in production systems.
Finally, Python is not a silver bullet for everything. Despite its multipurpose nature, it may have performance, cloud, and compatibility challenges that other languages can address. However, Python remains a very competitive tool for responding to many of the new challenges and building the next generation of technologies that will dominate the digital space, keeping companies ahead and competitive.