PyOhio 2015 Talk on Smiley and Iterative Development
Yesterday I gave a talk titled “How I Built a Power Debugger Out of the Standard Library and Things I Found On the Internet” at PyOhio 2015. The slides and video are now online.
Smiley demonstrates how to use Python’s native tracing capabilities to monitor not just what parts of your program run, but the data flowing through the program as it runs. All of the data is recorded for study after the program exits, which means you can pass different inputs and then compare the results of the runs. In this presentation, I will describe the evolution of Smiley, from concept through internal API changes as I worked on the implementation. I will also talk about tracing Python programs in general, and explain how the trace code in Smiley can be used to send trace data to different output destinations.