Python Study Group
What is it?
The Python Study Group is an opportunity to learn, teach and discuss Python with your fellow edXers! Meetings occur once every three weeks and are listed on the engineering calendar.
How does it work?
Usually, a single presenter will put together a talk on a topic of their choosing. It can be anything related to python, including particular libraries or edX-specific patterns and usages. Sometimes we vary the format with things like
Group code reviews
Helping someone with a personal project
Roundtable
AMAs with some of our experts
We are also actively looking to expand the different types of study group meetings, so if you have an idea please ping the group runner (currently @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) ) on slack.
Who can present?
Newbies, experts, and everyone in between. We especially encourage folks who are newer to python to present, as there is no better way to learn a topic than to teach others. We have also had presentations of the form ‘please help me with this thing I don’t understand,' where one person picked the brain of the assembly on a topic they were struggling with.
Tell me more about presenting
We have put together a handy guide to presenting at PSG: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/2856158322 . If you are interested in presenting, please reach out to @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) in Slack.
Schedule:
Some links are still in the process of being migrated as part of the Google docs migration
Most recent event should be at the top of the table.
Date | Topic | Presenter | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
2023-04-18 | DRF musings | @Alexander Dusenbery | https://github.com/iloveagent57/drf-best-practices/blob/aed/yells-at-cloud/docs/drf-jazz-20230418.md |
2022-04-05 | Testing roundtable |
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bQ7VcW-gz1S9T-Ls4aWgZK54jyOUntQH/view?usp=sharing |
2022-03-15 | Async IO | @Christopher Pappas and @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) |
Video: |
2022-02-22 | Why Your Mocks Don’t Work | @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) @Tim McCormack | Video: |
2022-02-01 | Particularly Clueless Presenter: ASGI and WSGI | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | Video: Slides/notes: |
2022-01-11 | The Django 3.2 Upgrade: Automation, Coordination, and Highlights | @Jeremy Bowman (Deactivated) | Video: Django 3.2 upgrade project page: Original DjangoCon presentation |
2021-11-09 | XBlocks | @Nathan Sprenkle | video: On the role of XBlocks going forward: Extra XBlock thoughts (+ regrets): |
2021-10-19 | Well That’s Interesting: edX’s Favorite Python Gotchas | Many! | video: Notebook: |
2021-09-28 | When To Use FP in Python | @Kevin Afable (Deactivated) |
|
2021-09-07 | N+1 | @Ken Clary (Deactivated) |
|
2021-07-06 | Group code review | @Feanil Patel |
|
2021-06-15 | Generators | @Diane Kaplan (Deactivated) | recording: |
2021-05-25 | Persistent Celery Task Results | @Alexander Dusenbery | (link to demo PR inside) |
2021-04-13 | Django Admin | @Dave Ormsbee | recording: |
2021-03-23 | Ask me (ned) anything! | @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) | – |
2021-03-02 | Debugging tricky problems |
@Feanil Patel @Tim McCormack |
|
2021-02-09 | HACKATHON!!! |
|
|
2021-01-19 | Dunder Methods | @Christopher Pappas |
Whe
Potential Topics
Date | Topic | Presenter | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
DATE TBD | Async/Await | @Christopher Pappas | |
DATE TBD | Is Python pass-by-value or pass-by-reference | @Nathan Sprenkle | |
DATE TBD | How XBlocks work in the context of edX platform | @Nathan Sprenkle | |
DATE TBD (but not soon, busy ramping up with devops/SRE) | Context Managers | @Christopher Pappas | |
DATE TBD | pip-tools: Demystifying "make upgrade" | @Kyle McCormick | |
DATE TBD | Creating public APIs on edx-platform | @Jesper Hodge |
|
Older Study Group Sessions
Date | Topic | Presenter | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
3/15/18 | Generators | ||
4/3/18 | Generator Expressions | ||
4/17/18 | Multiple Inheritance | ||
5/1/18 | Decorators | ||
5/22/18 | Special Methods | ||
6/12/18 | Itertools | ||
6/26/18 | Py 2 vs. Py 3 | ||
7/10/18 | Inheritance | ||
7/31/18 | Assignment | ||
8/14/18 | Exceptions | ||
8/28/18 | Scoping | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | https://github.com/BessieSteinberg/py_study_group/tree/master/scoping |
9/11/18 | Mocking | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
9/25/18 | Cancelled due to Hackathon | ||
10/9/18 | Callables: a Smorgasbord | @Ben Holt (Deactivated) | https://github.com/inventhouse/tutorials/tree/master/PySG-Callables |
10/23/18 | More Fun with Callables! | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | https://github.com/BessieSteinberg/py_study_group/tree/master/callables |
11/6/18 | Decorators | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
11/20/18 | Context Managers | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
12/4/18 | Python 3 | Troy Sankey | |
12/18/18 | Iterators and Iterables | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
1/1/19 | Cancelled due to Work Holiday | ||
1/15/19 | Fun with import | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
1/29/19 | Cancelled due to Hackathon | ||
2/12/19 | Comprehensions | @Ben Holt (Deactivated) | Postponed due to winter storm - get home safely! |
2/26/19 | Comprehensions | @Ben Holt (Deactivated) | Ben sick today, sorry! 😞 |
2019-03-12 | Write a unit test from scratch | @Alexander Dusenbery | |
2019-03-26 | Cancelled due to Open edX Conference | ||
2019-04-09 | Comprehensions | @Ben Holt (Deactivated) | |
2019-04-23 | Factories (Fuzzy text and stuff) | @Rickie Reilly (Deactivated) | |
2019-05-07 | |||
2019-05-21 | Debugging, pdb, finding stuff | @Alexander Dusenbery | |
2019-06-06 | Assignment Rerun | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
2019-06-18 | Factories (Fuzzy text and stuff) | @Rickie Reilly (Deactivated) | |
2019-07-02 | Regular Expressions | @Christopher Pappas | |
2019-07-16 | DRYer testing (with mixins, ddt, etc.) | @Kyle McCormick | |
2019-07-30 | Decorators | @Jinder Singh (Deactivated) | |
2019-08-13 | Inheritance | @Bessie Steinberg (Deactivated) | |
2019-08-27 | Pickling | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | |
2019-09-10 | Which is faster? | @Feanil Patel | |
2019-09-24 | Efficient Queries with the Django ORM | @Calen Pennington (Deactivated) | |
2019-10-08 | Virtual Env Wrappers | @Christopher Pappas | |
2019-10-22 | CLI tools | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | |
2019-11-05 | Potpourri | @Alexander Dusenbery | |
2019-11-19 | Objects | @Kyle McCormick | |
2019-12-03 | Mocking | @Christopher Pappas | |
2019-12-17 | Ask me (Ned) anything! | @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) | |
2019-12-31 | NEW YEARS EVE | ||
2020-1-14 | Magnets Decorators, how do they work?? | @Ben Holt (Deactivated) | https://github.com/inventhouse/tutorials/blob/master/PySG-Decorators/Decorators.ipynb |
2020-1-28 | Scope (and Closures) | @Christopher Pappas | |
2020-2-11 | CANCELLED: HACKATHON | ||
2020-2-25 | Parse time vs run time evaluation | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | |
2020-3-10 | Strings underneath the hood | @Christopher Pappas | |
2020-3-31 | Type Hints | @Jinder Singh (Deactivated) | |
2020-4-21 | Django Shell and observing DB stuff | @Christopher Pappas | |
2020-5-12 | Fooling Algolia With Delegators: A Case Study | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | |
2020-06-01 | String formatting | @Juliana Kang | https://github.com/julianajlk/study/blob/master/PSG_formatstring.ipynb |
2020-06-23 | Python Governance | @Jinder Singh (Deactivated) | |
2020-07-14 | Django at 20,000 Feet | @Nathan Sprenkle |
|
2020-08-03 | Decorators | @Emma Green (Deactivated) | |
2020-08-25 | Role-based access control, JWTs, and how to live your best life in 2020 (w.r.t. to Django view AuthN/Z). | @Alexander Dusenbery |
demonstrates how to make use of edx-rbac in a toy IDA that can get a JWT from the devstack LMS. |
2020-09-15 | Decorators part 2 | @Emma Green (Deactivated) |  |
2020-10-06 | "What does that do?" – Interesting Python snippets from edX repositories | @Kyle McCormick | |
2020-10-27 | Closures (and more!) | @Tim McCormack | Jupyter notebook dump: |
2020-11-17 | Context Managers | @Rebecca Graber (Deactivated) | Jupyter notebook:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B8z1XJofd6PRqhCI011Q6CLxcQHNHxOM/view?usp=sharing |
2020-12-08 | Multithreading | @Diane Kaplan (Deactivated) | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCX-8h8Ob64BQcjkLf1GWysx7IPtJNA5/view?usp=sharing |
Topic Ideas:
Is there something in python that seems like magic? Is there a topic you wish you knew more about? Add it to the list! You don't have to present it, but it's helpful to have a list to pull from.
decorators
mock patch, decorators used in testing
context managers
py2 vs. py3
Bultin vs. local
mocking
descriptors
pdb and other debuggers
spying & advanced mocking (ex. called with correct args)
testing
pytest feature rundown
generators
generator comprehensions and list comprehensions
iterators/iterables
write a new unit test from scratch / from the code base
installing dependeces / set up tools "whole ecosystem of crap that you need to use python"
publish package to pip
how do we do it here?
the src dir in our docker devstack
regular expressions
pickle: And it's three fatal flaws! SPOOKY!
setup.py
modules and imports; how to import modules; import statements
sys.path
python 3 changes to relative path
from _ _future_ _
Random library
venv wrappers
Objects
Lambdas
Writing command-line tools
Argparse
click
Jupyter
edX BI Toolkit
Xonsh
Context managers
Parse time vs run time evaluation
Is Python interpreted or compiled? Yes!
Sad that Python Study Group is only every three weeks?
Head over to Frontend Study Group and Arch Study Group!