Python Developers Can Learn Quantum Computing by Fixing Bugs

Most quantum programming happens in Python, and the fastest way in for a working developer is contributing to the packages themselves rather than studying theory first.

This piece is adapted from our live interview session with Sebastian Hassinger, author of The New Quantum Era and former quantum lead at AWS and IBM, which anchors the Deep Engineering newsletter issue on quantum progress. The words below are his.

So getting quantum ready means different things depending on who is asking, but for a working software developer it mostly means building some intuition for what a quantum information approach to a problem actually looks like. And the best way to get there is usually through coding rather than through reading theory first.

The tools are already familiar

Most of the programming that goes on in quantum computing happens in Python. Qiskit, the IBM SDK, is a Python SDK. Amazon Braket, which I worked on during my years at AWS, is also Python. There are a number of others in Python or in other well understood languages. The way you construct a task and send it to a quantum computer uses tools we all already know, and the genuinely difficult part is the logic of the circuit itself, not the surrounding machinery. So there are plenty of easy entry points for making yourself familiar with the field.

Start by closing tickets

My favorite route for a developer runs through the Unitary Foundation, where I am a fellow. Every year they run an event called Unitary Hack, a global couple of weeks that has been remote and is starting to become an in person thing as well. Maintainers of open source quantum software repositories tag issues in their repos, and developers close those issues out and claim bounties for the ones they resolve. The issues are often housekeeping, administrative work, security tasks, things that are very familiar to classical developers and have to do with the capability, resiliency, and maintainability of the package. But as a side effect you get to see the insides of how that quantum software package actually works.

What that path can turn into

My favorite example of how this can turn out involves an engineer named Misty Wahl. She worked at ASML as a mechanical engineer, had just finished shipping a major project there, and was looking for something to get involved in. She was interested in quantum computing without any particular background in quantum information. She got involved in Unitary Hack and started closing tickets in Mitiq, an open source error mitigation framework. Error mitigation is almost a building block toward error correction, where you do not have full correction but you are finding ways to tease better signal out of the noise, so Mitiq lets you experiment with different approaches to that. Two or three years later she was lead author on research papers on quantum error mitigation. Her experience turned her into a quantum information researcher.

That does not happen for everybody, but it is certainly a viable path, and you do not have to wait for the annual event to start. The Unitary Foundation runs a Discord server year round, and all of the popular packages with a lot of users have a channel on it. You can see what packages are out there, including open source simulation packages, which are particularly good ways to develop an understanding of how quantum circuits get represented and what those algorithms look like. You are building a simulator to classically run a quantum circuit, so you end up learning the structure from the inside.

Why this beats the academic route

For a developer this really is the best way in, because the alternative is getting a PhD in physics and a job in a lab or at IBM or AWS or Google, and that is a very long path that is not for everyone. The field remains extremely challenging to enter as a practitioner. But other people’s hard work has made it far easier for the rest of us to reach real quantum computers over the Internet using tools we are already comfortable with.

Two things to do this week

If you want to act on this, pick one open source quantum package and read its issue tracker this week, looking specifically for the maintenance work rather than the physics. And join the Discord for whichever package you choose, because seeing what its actual users are stuck on will teach you more about where the field stands than another explainer will.

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The full conversation goes further, covering why qubit counts mislead and where quantum pays off first, over in issue 58 of Deep Engineering.