Everything you need to know about docstrings, but never wanted to ask
ABSTRACT
Remember early grade school and those repetitive handwriting drills in exercise books? We grew up and swapped notebooks for a code editor, but the habit stuck. Let's face it: for most developers, writing docstrings is just another programmer drill - something we feel forced to do, even though few remember why. It ends up acting as nothing more than a graphical separator between a function's signature and its implementation.
Many of us live with the mindset that "good code documents itself," making triple quotes feel like a waste of time. The result? We either skip docstrings entirely or generate automated monstrosities that proudly reveal get_user_id(user) is meant to... get user id.
Join this session if you dread writing docstrings. I promise that afterwards, you're still allowed to dislike it - but at least doing it will be less painful and far more useful!
BIO
About Maria Lowas-Rzechonek
I graduated in philosophy and social science. True to Zed A. Shaw's advice from "Learn Python the Hard Way", I entered the tech world as "an anthropologist with barely enough of the local language to get around and survive". My next step led me to the Django Girls community - first as an attendee, then as a coach, committer and organizer. I have been working as a Python developer since 2016. I was a speaker at DjangoCon Europe 2016, EuroPython 2026 and Pykonik (the Kraków Python community).
In my free time, I’m involved in the extreme sport of mountain hiking with my kids, as well as dancing flamenco.