A Lazy Person's Guide to Building REST Clients or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dunder Overrides
Part of the DevOops: Learning from Failure specialist track
Sick of writing lots of dedicated methods to perform the same tasks? Want to write less code? This talk may be for you!
REST API's are ubiquitious, and a very useful way to send and recieve data from various services. However, building them can often feel repetitive and boring. So, because I was lazy, and sick of doing it I decided to override specific dunder methods to write less boiler plate code, and keep myself interested.
Was it easier? Probably not. Did it require less work than a normal implementation? Also probably not. Did it make my code more readable and portable? Definitely not. But it was fun, and I learnt how overriding Python's magic methods - often called dunders - could be useful. Let me share the lessons I learnt with you and inspire your own ideas.
Early in my Python learning journey I was having to rapidly prototype and implement REST clients for grabbing information. Bored of writing what felt like the same code over and over again, I wanted a more interesting way of solving the problem.
Curious about pythons error handling, and knowing little about magic methods beyond __init__(), I stumbled across ways to manipulate attribute access and creation. Spending far to much time diving deeper, I learned how to query REST endpoints without having to define a dedicated method for each call.
Luckily, we can all learn from my abilility to overcomplicate even the simplest tasks. Aimed at users who want to explore class customisation, those who want to add some new problem solving tools to their belt, or anyone wanting to hear how overcomplicating problems can be one of the best learning tools.
We will touch on: - What are magic methods, and how you can start using them. - Why reading the Python reference documentation is useful. - How to deal with undefined class attributes. - Creating and implementing callable objects.
While the story and example focus on building a REST client, the concepts presented can be applied to many problems.
Ash is a cyber security engineer with a background in medical device testing. Chronically incapable of saying no to interesting projects or weird technical problems, they are also allergic to writing scripts more than ~300 lines long. Involved in a number of pride networks, they're passionate about expanding queer representation in cyber security and engineering.
They still haven't figured out what DevSecOps is, and at this point are too afraid to ask.