We rarely think about the dot “.” between our objects and their fields, but there are quite a lot of things that happen every time we use one in Python. This talk will explore the details of what happens, how the descriptor protocol works, and how it can be used to alter the Python object model. Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2019 and https://github.com/PyCon/2019-slides"