Mark Smith

Developers are excited about AI, but not about the proven practices that would make them faster today. I'll explore the efficiency gaps hiding in plain sight – from debugging habits to testing strategies to software design – and argue that these fundamentals become even more essential when AI...

Many of the latest LLMs now have the ability to use tools - functions you can write that the LLM can call if it needs more data, say from web search, or to execute a task, like sending an email. When combined with the ability to look up data from a vector database using unstructured inputs, that...

Wouldn't it be great if you could dump your logs into a database and then ask questions like "Were there any errors around 9pm yesterday? What caused them?" Wouldn't it also be awesome to be able to store chat-logs in a database and then ask "Was Dave happy after his support call yesterday?"...

I have a GitHub repository that contains a compilation of all the awful code I've written over the years, abusing features like metaclasses, decorators, various __dunder__ methods, and the mutable nature of Python's underlying data structures. It's a funny way to see how Python works under the...

FastAPI is an asynchronous Python web framework that is "performant, easy to learn, fast to code & ready for production; React is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks; and MongoDB is a database that stores JSON-like data. Let's build an app to put them all together!

MongoDB is webscale, right? It's a JSON database, it's eventually consistent. Oh, and it's insecure. Let me clear up some things: MongoDB is an ACID-compliant database with transactions, schemas & relationships. It includes a powerful aggregation query language. MongoDB doesn't store JSON, and...

On every computer I've had for the past 20 years, I've created a folder called "stupid python tricks". It's where I put code that should never see the light of day. Code that abuses features like decorators, metaclasses, and dynamic typing to do terrible things. Code I'm going to teach you.

On every computer I've had for the past 20 years, I've created a folder called "stupid python tricks". It's where I put code that should never see the light of day.

Let's talk about functions, methods, callables and closures - what they are, what you can do with them ... and what's inside. Afterwards you'll know more about callables, along with techniques both practical and so extreme your colleagues will never let you merge them to master.

Don't be afraid of metaclasses! This talk will explain how, once you've grasped basic types, classes and inheritance, Python's advanced language features such as descriptors and metaclasses are just within your reach.