Dom Weldon
Dom Weldon is a Principal Software Engineer at decisionLab, a London-based mathematical modelling consultancy with expertise in machine learning, simulation, optimization and visualization. Dom's team specialize in taking models from data scientists and turning them into production ready tools. Current clients include the Royal Navy, Siemens and various UK public bodies.
Dom came to decisionLab from his PhD studies in Computational Geography at King's College London, his initial degree was in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and holds a master's in the historical and cultural geography of the Cold War United States. Outside of work, Dom is interested in languages and travelling, and holds a voluntary statutory appointment on a board monitoring the welfare and dignity of prisoners in a challenging North London jail.
It's Your Call(able): a tour of Python's callable (function) interface
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Dom WeldonFunctions are fundamental to python, and are amongst the first features of python that most users learn. We call a function with arguments, and it returns a value. However, there is more to this callable interface than meets the eye, and there are lots of useful and powerful things we can do with the callable interface. You may have come across many of these already: (anonymous) lambda functions, the call magic method, the decorator pattern, the doc property, and modules like functools and inspect which provide detailed about functions and allow us to alter functions at runtime. The now-retired Python 3.6 release added typing annotations to this mix, and opened up a new world of metadata to use alongside your callables.
Lots of libraries, particularly web frameworks like Flask, Django, and FastAPI, and testing toolkits like pytest, use this callable interface to implement their API. As developers, understanding these advanced features of python’s callable interface is particularly useful when writing generic, automation focused code, and understanding how such prominent libraries work.
This talk gives a deep-dive into python functions, and the associated callable interface. We’ll start with a quick tour of the basics, before covering python’s more advanced callable features, and exploring some examples about how, why, and when you may wish to use these features yourself.