Mike Graham: The Life Cycle of a Python Class

Date: Monday, April 11th @ 7pm

And end-to-end look at the life and death of a class and its instance.

In this talk, we'll write a very simple class and walk through everything that happens when we define it, instantiate it, use it, and eventually let it be garbage collected. We will address the topics of metaclasses, __new__, descriptors, etc. to understand when and where they can come into play. (This talk does not provide a how-to on these advanced topics, but more of a how-to-debug for code that might be using them.)

Mike Graham is an engineer and scientist who has used Python to solve a wide variety of problems, focusing on high-performance settings. He is currently part of Edgestream Partners, a quantitative investment management firm which has used Python deeply for over a decade. Before that, Mike's work focused on the development and application of numerical models in materials science, aerospace engineering, and naval architecture. Mike is a Gold-Badge Python contributor on StackOverflow and a moderator of the #python and #pydata IRC channels. Mike has a B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University.