It’s pretty hard to believe that the entire summer has gone by, and I’ll be coming home in less than two weeks. But before that, I did something brave! On Monday, I went way outside my comfort zone and gave a talk at EdmontonPy, the local Python user’s group. The talk was about a specific metaprogramming feature in Python called decorators. If you know what that means, or think you’d like to know, you can check out the project page on GitHub, or jump straight into the GitHub repo for extra goodies.
Anyway, I’m not going to reiterate the content of the talk here. The text is online (I even edited a lot of things after the presentation), as is a rough version of my script, and a recording is on YouTube. That basically covers anything anyone could want. I just thought I’d write up my thoughts about the experience.
Inspiration
Towards the end of June, I started wondering whether I should invest more in my programming skills. I was already learning a lot at work, by necessity, but I thought I could be doing more. I searched for “Ottawa Python”, and found Ottawa Python Author’s Group. Obviously, I then checked to see if there was anything for Edmonton - and there was! So I tentatively decided to attend the July meeting, and managed to follow through on it, too (though I came close to turning around a couple times on the way there).
I enjoyed Daniel Nephin’s talk on itertools, and Aden Grue’s talk about Unicode brought up the one or two Unicode pitfalls I was lucky enough not to trip on already. I chatted for a bit with one of the primary organizers, Brian Forst, who also works at the University of Alberta. While I hadn’t asked my supervisors for permission yet, I’d also gotten particularly excited about the idea of going to PyCon Canada. I asked around, and was directed to (I think - correct me if I’m wrong!) Diana Clarke who has been involved in organizing the most recent PyCons. We chatted for a bit about the conference, and she more or less suggested that I might want to wait until next year and apply for funding of some kind. Didn’t matter in the end, though, because the timing was bad (my supervisors would be getting back from month long trips at the same time).
Anyway! So that was all well and good. As I was walking back to the subway station, obviously inspired, I started reading an ebook I’d bought called Guide to: Learning Python Decorators by Matt Harrison. I got the ebook on Amazon fairly cheaply, but I won’t link it ‘cause he deserves a larger cut of the sales. It’s concise, the writing is clear, and organized beautifully.
It’s laid out in such a way that concepts many people struggle with learning - functions as first class objects, closures - seem to just follow naturally from the content of the previous sections. Even though the majority of the book isn’t literally about decorators, the earlier sections make them much easier to understand. Plus, it turns out that closures are pretty simple and they’re actually really useful.
In other words, there may never be a better explanation of decorators than Matt’s book.
Despite the high quality of the book, upon getting home and finishing the book (it’s no longer than it needs to be), I decided I could probably give a talk on the subject. I must have known at the time that I couldn’t possibly present the topic as well as the book had, but I felt like stretching my boundaries, so I sent off an e-mail volunteering to give a talk in August.
I promptly got an e-mail back saying they already had two talks scheduled, but they’d keep me in mind. They had announced the talks for August, right in front of me, and apparently I forgot five minutes later. Oops. But then a few weeks ago I got an e-mail saying the original presenter was too busy to prepare a talk, and they were looking for volunteers. Woo!
Anyway, I’ll post shortly about how it actually went, and then after that will be a bunch of technical notes that will, some day, show up as search results for the people as frustrated as I was when I prepared my presentation.