News

This month’s IndyPy — Indiana’s largest Python meetup founded in 2007 by Six Feet Up CTO and AWS Community Hero, Calvin Hendryx-Parker — featured an engaging tale of the speaker’s journey to identify and debug an issue with pytest using Django.

Speaker Cris Ewing, Head of Backend Engineering at Coffee Meets Bagel, explained the process of tracing back his bug between a:

• web framework,
• test framework and
• database.

Bug Hunt Lessons Learned

There are six takeaways from Cris’ debugging journey that apply to all developers:

1. ‘print()’ works.
2. Logging is powerful.
3. Get context.
4. Where you want to be may not be where you are.
5. Trust your instincts.
6. Always, always, always read the manual.

While the bug was hard to find, the solution was simple and small. Cris left the Django world a better place by submitting a pull request to improve documentation. Now, others won’t have to experience the same conundrum he did.

Watch Cris’ talk:

Links and Resources:

• pytest_django plugin: https://pytest-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
• PEP 249: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/
• PyMOTW: sqlite3 - Embedded Relational Database: https://pymotw.com/2/sqlite3/
• PyMOTW: inspect - Inspect Live Objects: https://pymotw.com/3/inspect/index.html#module-inspect
• Read the full Twitter thread of Cris’ talk on IndyPy’s Twitter at: https://twitter.com/indypy/status/1402357396773670913