On a limited number of occasions I have had need to reach directly into some of the raw files produced by Autodesk's Maya. There isn't much documentation I could find on the web, so I will try to lay out what I have learned here.

The generic structure is based on the IFF format, but with enough small changes to warrant this exploration (with lots of kudos to cgkit's implementation, which helped with some of the gritty details).

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I am often asked my opinion on how to get starting with programming, and usually with Python in particular. I usually outline three different routes that must be taken: learning how to work with Python, learning best practises for Python, and reading lots of good code from others.

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I have been working very heavily with Shotgun for the last several months, creating much deeper integrations between it and Western X's pipeline.

One of the things that bit me pretty early on is that the official Python API for Shotgun can not make parallel requests.

Under most conditions this isn't a big problem; the underlying connection would just serialize my threads' access to the Shotgun server, adding some latency, but it wasn't too bad. What was very irritating, however, was that a particular version of Python on OS X 10.6 would occasionally segfault during parallel requests. It took quite a few days of debugging Python in GDB (not a particularly easy prospect, especially since the problem was hard to reproduce) to isolate the problem to a bug in the ssl module's use of zlib to compress the request before sending it to the server.

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