How do you annotate for custom classes?

Say that I have a class, Shard, and my return value for a method should be a list of Shard objects.

my_method(args) -> ??:

Pycharm kicks up an error when I imported List from typing and specified List[Shard] (the error is related to it not being able to find Shard).

Here is the method in question:

def _return_shards(self, sql: str = None) -> List[Shard]:
        """
        Queries the database to return a sequence of all the database clusters
        and shards, and then creates Shard objects with the information.

        @type conn_info: dict
        :param conn_info: Database information containing the host, port, user,
         database, and password.
         @type sql: str

        :return: A list of Shard items
        """
        logging.info('Creating shards.')
        cursor = self._return_cursor(self.canvas_conn)

        stock_query = '''
              SELECT
                database_server_id || 'dr' database_server_id
              , CASE
                  WHEN database_server_id LIKE 'cluster1' AND name IS NULL THEN 'canvas'
                  WHEN database_server_id LIKE 'cluster4' AND name IS NULL THEN 'canvas'
                  WHEN name IS NULL THEN database_server_id
                  ELSE name
                END AS database_name
                ,SUBSTRING(database_server_id FROM '\d+$')::INT cluster_id
                ,CASE
                  WHEN name IS NULL THEN SUBSTRING(database_server_id FROM '\d+$')::INT
                  ELSE SUBSTRING(name FROM '\d+$')::INT
                END AS shard_id
              FROM canvas.switchman_shards
              WHERE database_server_id LIKE 'cluster%'
              ORDER BY cluster_id, shard_id
              '''
        if sql:
            cursor.execute(sql)
        else:
            cursor.execute(stock_query)
        results = cursor.fetchall()
        self._set_reporter_total_shards(count=len(results))
        return [Shard(
            *result,
            job=self.job,
            manifest=self.manifest,
            reporter=self.reporter.create_slave(db=result[0], schema=result[1])
        ) for result in results]

The error is NameError: name 'Shard' is not defined even though the Shard class is defined in the same module.

Shard isn't defined yet, either because you're still in the middle of the class definition, or because Shard is defined below this class. Give the name as a string:

def _return_shards(self, sql: str = None) -> List['Shard']: