Tech Talks #76

Sometimes it takes someone really smart to be able to do something seemingly really stupid - well, assuming one does not want to shoot themselves in the foot (or blow the whole foot off, as is the case with the module we'll be talking about). The fuckit module walks a thin line between genius and insanity by going through hoops to make sure "your Python code runs whether it has any right to or not", by steamrolling any errors present in your program.

The question popping in your head should now be "But how?" and the answer goes surprisingly deep in Python's internal modules, that we're going to unveil during the lecture.

This talk should be of interest to any Python developer, regardless of their race, gender or programming experience. Why? Because, let's face it, we've all been there: it's 16:00 on a Friday, the code is still a mess, and the only thing that prevents us from starting the weekend is that shiny "Deploy to Prod" button...

"Fuck it!"

In this talk we will dive into my journey of open source development and how I got into and maintain the Pwndbg project. Pwndbg is a free and open source plugin for GDB and LLDB written in Python, developed on MIT license. We will start with a project demo, showing its use cases. Then we will talk about the project history, coding sprints that I organized and various pain points of maintaining an open source project like this. We will also discuss testing, linting, git workflows and releases. The last one is interesting considering that Pwndbg is not a typical Python project where you can just "pip install" something, since you need GDB or LLDB debugger and various native dependencies. We will finish the talk with some random case studies from attempting to optimize the project, GSoC/PSoC successes and... packaging with homebrew.