In a recent code review, the following snippet was called out as reinventing the

wheel:

_MICROSECONDS_PER_SECOND = 1000000

def _timedelta_to_microseconds(delta):

  return int(delta.total_seconds() * _MICROSECONDS_PER_SECOND)

The reviewer thought that there must already exist a standard library function

that fulfills this functionality. After we had both satisfied ourselves that we

hadn't simply missed something in the documentation, we decided that we had

better raise the issue with a wider audience.