Secrets of the "Secrets of the Framework Creators"

As I wrote in my personal blog, I'm at PyCon. There has already been plenty of good fodder for a handful of blog posts. But I'll start at the beginning and work my way through the conference chronologically.

Thursday was tutorial day. The first was "Secrets of the Framework Creators", presented by Feihong Hsu and Kumar McMillan. I've taken quite a few conference tutorials in the past (though this was my first at PyCon), but this must be the best-prepared. Leihong and Kumar put together a web-site and had the foresight to make it available for download instead of hosting it (which was good thinking since the conference Wi-Fi worked only periodically until yesterday). You can download it yourself from the Google Group they set up. (I asked their permission to blog about this. They also said they'd accept new members of the group that didn't take the tutorial.)

As you can see, they start (in index.html) by introducing themselves, and the tutorial. Then there are links to the four sections covered: Frame Hacks, Decorators, Metaclasses and Magic Methods. And finally on the main page is an introduction to PDB, should we need it. I didn't, since I have had to teach myself PDB and use it once or twice--because I was sloppy and didn't write unit tests. And I had already seen the breakpoint trick in one of -JJ's posts. But I didn't realize that when in PDB, you're in a "custom" Python interactive session. It's nice to know that anything I'm used to doing there should work in PDB.

In each of the four sections is a getting started section that introduces the concept, some (much appreciated) use cases that give examples of where it's been used, and a couple recipes to give you practice using each technique. They even think to list the prerequisite knowledge required for each recipe (with a link to documentation). Each recipe has hidden hints to help us along, and the solution if you're completely stuck. And they conclude each section with "caveats": warnings about the trade-offs and limitations of the technique.

It must have taken them quite a bit of time to put this together. (It's taking me a while just to describe it.)

They had time in the tutorial to go through one recipe in each section, and then we voted and used the time remaining to go through the second recipe in (if I recall correctly) Metaclasses and Frame Hacks.

I'm now working my way through the material again, so it (hopefully) sinks in. My next couple posts will be on what I learned in the frame hacks section.