Python is becoming widely used in bioinformatics, overtaking Perl and, slowly, R. At VLSCI, we now routinely use IPython Notebook as a research platform. We have been integrating bioinformatics visualisation tools into the notebook, and have set up hosting instances on the NeCTAR Australian Research Cloud as part of the Genomics Virtual Laboratory project. In this talk, I'll give an overview of how we use Python and IPython Notebook in real day-to-day research. After a brief introduction to genomics, I will cover the most important libraries and tools we use to work with genomic data in Python, as well as the different visualisation tools we have integrated with the notebook. I will show you how you can provision your own IPython Notebook server on the NeCTAR Australian Research Cloud with many tools pre-installed.