Graham Dumpleton: A master class in decorators, patching and tracing

The useful part

There is now a Workshops page on this site listing seventy free hands-on workshops, spread across five collections. I am on what has turned into an extended sabbatical, and I still haven't decided whether it ends with going back to a job or with retiring for good. The upside is that I have time to spare, and I have been putting it to use filling out the documentation and learning material for my open source projects, something that has always lagged well behind the code.

How it works

• Starting with the standard library The first collection is 14 Python decorator workshops.
• These replace the decorator workshops I announced back in April, which were hosted...
• They start with how decorators work in plain Python using nothing but the standard library, move on to what wrapt adds for decorators, monkey patching and object proxies, and finish with patching, testing...
• The other reason is that decorators, monkey patching and instrumentation are topics I have probably spent more time on than most people ever will.

What to take from it

I have been maintaining wrapt for well over a decade, and it grew out of the monkey patching I wrote for the New Relic Python agent before that. A lot of what I learned along the way only exists in my head, or is scattered across old blog posts and issue discussions.