2.1. Personal and work machines
Understanding Your IT Environment
In many workplaces, especially within larger organisations or regulated industries like insurance, IT departments control what software you can install and how your machine is configured. This means you may face restrictions such as lack of admin permissions, limited access to certain websites, or disabled features that affect how tools like Python or related libraries run.
Understanding these limitations early helps set realistic expectations and guides your setup process. It also means you can plan workarounds, such as using portable Python distributions, working with virtual environments, or leveraging cloud-based development tools when local installs aren’t possible.
It’s also useful to check with your analytics or data engineering teams about their environment standards. Aligning with them can reduce compatibility issues and make collaboration smoother.
Installing on personal machines
Installing tools on your own machine can be a good idea to understand how the admin side of the tools work. It also allows you to figure out how particular tools should work, and then if trying to build a similar process on a work machine you have a good idea of what is required.
Building out your own projects also means you can experiment easily with different tools and techniques and then can make recommendations at work for what would be useful for your team.
Security Considerations
Working in insurance pricing means handling sensitive and confidential data. Your development environment needs to follow security best practices to protect this data and comply with company policies.
Keep your work and personal environments separate to prevent accidental data leaks.