Sebastiaan Zeeff

Driven by the immense popularity of asynchronous frameworks, such as FastAPI, asynchronous database support suddenly became a hot topic in the Python community. As talking to your database often forms a significant portion of the input and output of your application, it's important to do that asynchronously as well. With the release of version 1.4, SQLAlchemy added support for Asynchronous I/O for both its core and ORM features. This means that you can now use the popular SQL toolkit for Python in your asynchronous applications.

In my talk, I will introduce you to the newly added support for asyncio in SQLAlchemy. I will go over how easy it is to set up the new AsyncEngine, point you to some of the differences with synchronous SQLAlchemy, and show you some of the pitfalls to avoid. In addition, I will also show you how you can run your existing synchronous SQLAlchemy code asynchronously to help you transition to a fully asynchronous application. By the end of my talk, you should know enough to start your own asynchronous SQLAlchemy adventure.

When someone starts learning about classes in Python, one of the first things they'll come across is "self" in the parameter list of a method. To keep it simple, it's usually explained that Python will automatically pass the current instance as the first argument to the method: "self" will refer to the instance the method was called on. This high-level explanation really helps with keeping the focus on learning the basics of classes, but it also side-steps what is really going on: It makes it sound like process of inserting "self" is something automagical that the language just does for you. In reality, the mechanism behind inserting self isn't magical at all and it's something you can very much play with yourself.

In this intermediate level talk, Sebastiaan Zeeff will take you down into the heart of the Python data model to explain how the mechanism behind inserting "self" works. He will talk about the descriptor protocol and how it allows you to modify how attributes are accessed, assigned, or deleted in Python. He hopes that understanding how descriptors work will demystify "self" in Python.

Other people: Matteo Bertucci Xithrius