I attended last year’s CodeMash conference and learned a lot. This year, I submitted a topic. Here’s my description:

Bottom-up programming with IPython

IPython is a vastly improved Python interactive interpreter.

You can start up the interpreter, load in a module, execute a function from that module, then hop from your interpreter into your favorite editor to redefine that function, then go back to the interpeter and run the automatically reloaded function.

If your new code raises an uncaught exception, you can start a python-debugger session right there and inspect the traceback.

With all these tools integrated, you can attack problems by building separate components and then put them together in the interpreter and watch what happens. If you find a bug, you have immediate access to the traceback, so you don’t need to go back into your code and logging or print statements.

Fans of iterative development and using introspection will likely enjoy this talk.

We’ll see what happens.