Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: This is episode 489, recorded July 21st, 2026.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I'm Calvin Hendryx-Parker.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And I'm Michael Kennedy.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Hey, Michael. Welcome. Good to see you.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: We want to make sure you all recognize our sponsorships of the show.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So thanks to Michael and the courses over at Talk Python.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Go check those out if you head over.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And he's got tons of new stuff he's been adding in there.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And I hear there's more on the way.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and then check out the fine folks over at Six Feet Up.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So I'm co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and we do some amazing consulting to solve hard problems.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: We love using Python.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I've been doing this for 27 years
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: as part of that agency and I love it.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: If you wanna connect with Michael and I between the shows,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you can find us on all the socials.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: We're on Mastodon, Bluesky, X, LinkedIn.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And then the show has also got links in the show notes
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: for the shows, Mastodon, Bluesky, and X.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: If you want to watch live, you can always catch us generally Tuesday mornings by time,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: very early mornings for Michael's time.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So 7 a.m. Pacific on pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Sometimes we'll get questions in there and we'll pop them onto the show and you can get
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: them answered right away.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Kind of real time feedback to the episode.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Older versions are also available there if you want to watch the live stream and see our
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: shiny faces as we go through and talk about the news of the day.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Speaking of the news, Michael, I think you're going to kick it off with the first article today.
Michael Kennedy: I am, but let me do a little follow-up to what you just said, actually,
Michael Kennedy: which is not normally something that deserves follow-up.
Michael Kennedy: But, you know, last time, a couple times ago, I talked about Hermes.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah.
Michael Kennedy: What a cool little thing.
Michael Kennedy: I've been getting more and more done with it.
Michael Kennedy: One of the things I did over the weekend was I've set up an automation
Michael Kennedy: such that Hermes can use the website to manage the YouTube channel.
Michael Kennedy: And then I set up a nightly job.
Michael Kennedy: So every night, as much credits as I can get for API interactions from YouTube, it will automatically go back and update the back catalog like 10 or 20 shows at a time.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And so it's on this cool, cool thing.
Michael Kennedy: So the live back catalog YouTube stuff is getting better and better because it happens as I sleep like it should.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I love that.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Getting the richer show notes, etc. put onto there.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I like the fact we can use this to make the world a better place.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah, exactly.
Michael Kennedy: Like it's just everybody gets, you know, links and stuff in there in the videos if they watch it.
Michael Kennedy: And how do you get it?
Michael Kennedy: Well, is it a JSON API or something else?
Michael Kennedy: We don't know.
Michael Kennedy: So I want to talk about Django or JSON.
Michael Kennedy: Is it ORJSON or ORJSON?
Michael Kennedy: It's probably ORJSON.
Michael Kennedy: Hi, OR is my guess.
Michael Kennedy: Let's go with OR.
Michael Kennedy: I agree because ORJSON is weird.
Michael Kennedy: ORJSON?
Michael Kennedy: OR?
Michael Kennedy: ORJSON.
Michael Kennedy: ORJSON?
Michael Kennedy: I don't know.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah.
Michael Kennedy: So I want to talk about this project from Adam Johnson.
Michael Kennedy: So we have a couple of Django topics.
Michael Kennedy: This one is a Django topic, but it also goes more broadly.
Michael Kennedy: So there's kind of a multi-level thing going on here.
Michael Kennedy: Not the marketing badness, but just multiple uses.
Michael Kennedy: So this is a project that Adam created so that you can change Django's response model.
Michael Kennedy: So apparently the way Django uses JSON or generates JSON responses happens in a bunch of different ways.
Michael Kennedy: So it says there's a library called ORJSON.
Michael Kennedy: And somewhere it says, yeah, here we go.
Michael Kennedy: It says, compared to Python's built-in JSON,
Michael Kennedy: it boasts 10x faster serialization and two times faster deserialization.
Michael Kennedy: And I believe it is a little bit more forgiving of date times and stuff.
Michael Kennedy: It has like default conversions,
Michael Kennedy: whereas if you've ever tried to serialize certain things, it's like, nope.
Michael Kennedy: Sounds like a win.
Michael Kennedy: I know it does.
Michael Kennedy: Like I couldn't possibly figure out a way to represent time.
Michael Kennedy: What a weird, this is a rare concept we don't normally encounter.
Michael Kennedy: So this handles some of those things as well.
Michael Kennedy: So there are a couple of reasons that you might play with it,
Michael Kennedy: but it is a little bit different.
Michael Kennedy: So be a bit careful.
Michael Kennedy: So, all right.
Michael Kennedy: So the idea is that there's a bunch of different places,
Michael Kennedy: like such a great library, but adopting it isn't easy
Michael Kennedy: when your framework uses JSON in multiple different parts,
Michael Kennedy: in different places.
Michael Kennedy: So Adam introduces Django ORJSON, which provides a bunch of replacements and you just plug it in, right?
Michael Kennedy: So import JSON response and you can return that directly, which is cool.
Michael Kennedy: There's test capabilities loaded up in a template and so on.
Michael Kennedy: After seeing the initial proposal, Django ORJSON,
Michael Kennedy: Paulo, who was recently on Talk Python to talk about maintainer burden and AI,
Michael Kennedy: coming back to that at the end as well, or later,
Michael Kennedy: decided to push for the addition of ORJSON support in Django itself
Michael Kennedy: under a new feature called pluggable JSON serialization backend,
Michael Kennedy: which I think is pretty cool.
Michael Kennedy: I'm all for it.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah, it's nice, right?
Michael Kennedy: Like, why not make that an option?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, totally.
Michael Kennedy: It's like saying, nah, that Pydantic thing,
Michael Kennedy: probably a flash in the pan.
Michael Kennedy: We don't need to really worry about that.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Let's go ask, did you get to try it out?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: You've got a lot of data.
Michael Kennedy: Yes.
Michael Kennedy: And so I'm like, well, let me just try this.
Michael Kennedy: And one of the things that's really cool is with Claude Code and other things, you can say, here is a proposal for how to do this for JSON.
Michael Kennedy: How would I do this for Flask and Cort, where I'm running my apps?
Michael Kennedy: And can you tell me the areas where it might be a benefit or not so much a benefit?
Michael Kennedy: Not only did I get a little summary for how that might go, it's like, and I set up some test performance runs, and it turns out that you get four times performance boost, not 10 times performance boost.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and yeah that's not bad no it's not too bad but i put that actually the reason like a little bit
Michael Kennedy: of that analysis into the show notes and it turns out that if you have large json documents with a
Michael Kennedy: few fields then it doesn't give you a big boost if you have a very fine-grained json document with
Michael Kennedy: lots of small fields apparently that's where this performance starts to pay off and i happen to have
Michael Kennedy: like big chunky JSON, I guess is what I got.
Michael Kennedy: I don't know.
Michael Kennedy: It's got things like 100K of transcripts in a response,
Michael Kennedy: you know, not, and it's structured as a giant piece of text.
Michael Kennedy: It's not necessarily like subtitle text second and so on.
Michael Kennedy: So that's interesting.
Michael Kennedy: And it said, look, it could help your MCP server,
Michael Kennedy: but the traffic on the MCP server is not that high.
Michael Kennedy: You swap it out,
Michael Kennedy: you'd probably save 0.119 milliseconds of requests.
Michael Kennedy: And for a response that takes 1.1 milliseconds,
Michael Kennedy: you really wouldn't mess with it?
Michael Kennedy: I decided no, which I thought was kind of interesting
Michael Kennedy: in the first place.
Michael Kennedy: Like, you try it out, you're like, oh, cool idea.
Michael Kennedy: Just not for my use case.
Michael Kennedy: Most of my stuff is RSS.
Michael Kennedy: It's HTML.
Michael Kennedy: It's like not that much JSON.
Michael Kennedy: But I do think for the right use case,
Michael Kennedy: it would be really powerful.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I mean, are there any compatibility caveats
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: that people need to be aware of here?
Michael Kennedy: There are some minor ones about how it handles certain things
Michael Kennedy: that either can't be serialized
Michael Kennedy: or if you don't specify how to serialize them,
Michael Kennedy: like for example, date times and stuff like that.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Which everyone loves dealing with date times.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It's our favorite.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah.
Michael Kennedy: Can we put some time zones in there please?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, yes.
Michael Kennedy: All right, over to you.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, very cool.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Well, mine's also performance related
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and I think it'll dovetail nicely
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: into what you just mentioned here.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Speaking of performance and JSON and evaluations,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I think one of the things that has been nice
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: about using these AI agents, like you just mentioned,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you can put it on a mission to go try some hypotheses and some theories and etc. This is a
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: article from Peter Mengson who revits a one from 2017. So this is actually the original performance
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: article he did around fastest Redis configurations for Django. So a lot of folks just use the default
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: out of the box configuration for Redis, kind of a standard thing these days to use for any kind of
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: caching that you might use inside of your application, but it has tunable capabilities
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: since you can adjust the format of the serializer. So whether it uses like JSON, UJSON, MessagePack,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: or Pickle, you can also adjust the compressors it may use. So whether it's using Zlib,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: LZMA, or ZStandard is a new one that's coming up. It didn't exist when he did this 2017.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So he just, actually, this is kind of all pre-AI as well. He did it the old school hard way,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: which is specify a bunch of different configuration combinations,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: run through a framework and try and test and see what the performance boost may be
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: based on the kind of data he threw at it.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So if you look down here, actually it's kind of fun,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: very ASCII art result graphs here.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I'm here for the ASCII art.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I'm here for it.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, I know.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So JSON is the slowest.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Here are the shorter or better, so best averages,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: like for averages, medians, and size of data stored.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: You can see here, JSON, not so great.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Actually, I wonder if in his updated version, he did not use ORJSON.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I wonder how that would affect this.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: But basically, MessagePack as a message format is going to be one of the fastest ones he found for this specific application.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And then if we look over here.
Michael Kennedy: I would bet that MessagePack is faster than ORJSON.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Probably still.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So I bet that sets a lower bound.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah. So updating here to look at three specific compressors, Zlibs, LZMA, and Zstandard,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the LZMA is still slow. While it compresses well, it's slower from a performance standpoint.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: The default, actually not doing too bad here, except for size of data stored, which if you're
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: saving larger sized items, there was a different performance difference, which actually I think
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: leads to why coding agents like Claude Code and Pi and these orchestrators allow you to do this
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: kind of experimentation with very low risk and overhead. Because ultimately, the end difference
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: matters on the kind of data, like you just mentioned, the kind of data you're storing
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: in these various serializers are going to determine a lot of the performance characteristics. So
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I hate saying it depends, but your mileage will vary based on what you're throwing into Redis and how
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you're accessing it. So it's always nice to be able to set up some kind of performance harness
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: or benchmark where you can actually test these yourself and see how you get the most mileage
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: out of these tools. And based on what I saw here, it seems like there's quite a bit of room for
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: improvement for eking out more performance. So as we typically do, I like starting off with the
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: defaults first and only optimize when I see a problem. But these are great ways to take a look
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: at the different message format serializers for Django Redis and then the various compression
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: formats that are out there for it so a nice methodology a nice little write-up showing some
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: of the results and showing that it's actually not too not too hard for you to go implement this
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: yourself a great way to get some squeeze more performance out of jango with your redis which
Michael Kennedy: is already fast but here you can i love it yeah yeah it's super fast i 100 endorse here let's try
Michael Kennedy: it with the built-in stuff and then see because yeah like in my example i could have taken on one
Michael Kennedy: more dependency and thing i have to update but it's like do you really need a tenth of a millisecond
Michael Kennedy: No, it makes zero difference to me, honestly.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: We'll talk about simplicity in my next one I bring up after yours here.
Michael Kennedy: Okay.
Michael Kennedy: I do have a little bit of real-time follow-up, sort of.
Michael Kennedy: I just chose to throw this out there, by the way.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Oh, nice.
Michael Kennedy: Just a quick shout-out to Valkey.
Michael Kennedy: When I hear stuff on Redis, I'm like, don't forget the Valkey.
Michael Kennedy: You're familiar with this, yes?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Oh, yeah.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: When there was a whole hoodoo around the licensing with Redis,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: we switched over to Valkey for many of our projects.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It's been great.
Michael Kennedy: Cool. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So basically Valkey is like the more open source,
Michael Kennedy: all a fork of Redis and it's like API compatible of my understanding, but it's,
Michael Kennedy: it's, you know, 26,000 stars. It's like a half a flask, something like that level of popularity.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah. Well, it's tricky because then the Redis folks went back on the whole
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Bizzle license back into open, right? Yeah, exactly. It gets, it gets a little funky,
Michael Kennedy: but let's talk about something that not even close to as controversial as that licensing
Michael Kennedy: Let's talk about Linus Torvalds puts his foot down against anti-AI kernel maintainers.
Michael Kennedy: There's a lot of double negatives here.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So Linus says...
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I had a hard time parsing that one.
Michael Kennedy: I know.
Michael Kennedy: Okay.
Michael Kennedy: So Linus says, I'm not having it, that there are people saying we're unwilling to use AI
Michael Kennedy: in any way against the Linux kernel.
Michael Kennedy: And it's pretty interesting.
Michael Kennedy: I'm going to link to the actual original thing here.
Michael Kennedy: I got some quotes that I pulled out.
Michael Kennedy: So this all has to do with this thing called Shashanko.
Michael Kennedy: And what Shashanko is, I don't work on the Linux kernel,
Michael Kennedy: so it's not a thing I'm super familiar with, just to be clear.
Michael Kennedy: But Shashanko is an AI PR review tool.
Michael Kennedy: I guess it's built into GitHub or something like that for automation.
Michael Kennedy: You know, like GitHub actions are the equivalent thereof.
Michael Kennedy: And it will review inbound PRs for bugs, for correctness, performance, that kind of stuff.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah.
Michael Kennedy: And I think there are some people that are like, no, heck no, I want nothing to do with this thing.
Michael Kennedy: So it's not necessarily just cutting AI completely loose and saying, hey, here's the spec of the kernel.
Michael Kennedy: Right.
Michael Kennedy: Make it better.
Michael Kennedy: See you next week.
Michael Kennedy: You know, it's way more subtle and less intense.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It's a human augmentation.
Michael Kennedy: It's making us better at what we do.
Michael Kennedy: Exactly. So I'll just pull out a couple of pieces here. I think this is, this is a little noteworthy. My understanding is he was fairly against this kind of stuff and then kind of played with it more. It's like, you know what, actually I'm not against it anymore. And let me just put this out there. Like he acknowledges it. I acknowledge it. I'm sure a lot of people will that there are downsides to AI in lots of ways, but there are also upsides. Right. And so says Linux is not one of those anti AI projects, you know, think Zig or something like that. Right.
Michael Kennedy: And if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open source thing and fork it or just walk away.
Michael Kennedy: It's like, you know what?
Michael Kennedy: Okay.
Michael Kennedy: I mean, what do you expect from him, right?
Michael Kennedy: That's true.
Michael Kennedy: What do you expect?
Michael Kennedy: AI is a tool, just like other tools we use, and it's clearly a useful one.
Michael Kennedy: And it may not have been that clearly even just a year ago, but that's no longer the question.
Michael Kennedy: I think that's an important thing, right?
Michael Kennedy: Like people have formed opinions, especially people who have formed the opinions like, I don't want to touch this.
Michael Kennedy: This is junk.
Michael Kennedy: It's like, why would you come back to a thing that's junk?
Michael Kennedy: You know what I mean?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Right.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Why would you go build a house with hand tools when you've got power tools available?
Michael Kennedy: Yes, exactly.
Michael Kennedy: Well, because nail guns are dangerous.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And we've had them since the 40s.
Michael Kennedy: I do want to point out that there's this really good, I've mentioned this guy before on the show.
Michael Kennedy: Are you familiar with this?
Michael Kennedy: I am not.
Michael Kennedy: Maximilian Schwarzmüller, this German guy.
Michael Kennedy: He's really good at talking about trends in software development.
Michael Kennedy: And one of the things he says here is he, in response to talking about this, said it is time to wake up for some.
Michael Kennedy: So he put it less, more bluntly saying, look, if in a couple of years, if you're doing professional software development, you're going to have to be using these tools.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah.
Michael Kennedy: And you need to get good at them regardless of how you feel about them.
Michael Kennedy: You know what I mean?
Michael Kennedy: It's fine for hobby stuff not to do it.
Michael Kennedy: That's like a 12 minute.
Michael Kennedy: That's a summary of a 12 minute video, but it's really well done.
Michael Kennedy: So I recommend people check it out.
Michael Kennedy: And he's just an interesting guy.
Michael Kennedy: Okay, back to what Linus is saying.
Michael Kennedy: Yes, it can be somewhat painful tool
Michael Kennedy: for maintainer workloads and so on.
Michael Kennedy: And also because it just keeps finding embarrassing bugs,
Michael Kennedy: which is annoying, but amazing.
Michael Kennedy: I think that this embarrassing bugs bit is actually transient.
Michael Kennedy: We've got 10, 20, you know,
Michael Kennedy: however long the projects have been around for,
Michael Kennedy: years of tech debt.
Michael Kennedy: Tons.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah, and we send this tool on.
Michael Kennedy: It's like running a linter.
Michael Kennedy: Like, do you guys have a linter?
Michael Kennedy: No. Oh, you should try a black or rough or something.
Michael Kennedy: And then it's like, there's 2000 errors.
Michael Kennedy: we can't fix 2000 errors.
Michael Kennedy: Like we just don't run it anymore.
Michael Kennedy: You know what I mean?
Michael Kennedy: But projects that start adopting linters
Michael Kennedy: don't always have 2000 warnings or issues, right?
Michael Kennedy: All right, carrying on.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: But the solution is not to put your hand.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It feels like nothing but win here.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Like you want a linter?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I wouldn't go without it right now, period.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah, 100%.
Michael Kennedy: It's just, it's kind of painful
Michael Kennedy: to deal with some of the fixes,
Michael Kennedy: but you know, you get through them
Michael Kennedy: and then it's pretty straightforward,
Michael Kennedy: especially with --fix
Michael Kennedy: and a lot of the modern ones.
Michael Kennedy: Okay.
Michael Kennedy: So the solution here says Linus
Michael Kennedy: is not to put your head in the sand and sing la la la can't hear you at the top of your voice
Michael Kennedy: it's to make sure the lm tools help maintainers instead of causing them pain we're not for and
Michael Kennedy: here's the essence of this whole um thing we're not forcing anyone to use it but i will verily
Michael Kennedy: loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people using it there's no ai is not perfect
Michael Kennedy: but but blankety blank anyone who points the problems points to the problems that ai had
Michael Kennedy: better be looking in the mirror and pointing themselves at the same time because people make
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: mistakes too all right pretty certainly i did not write this email post yeah this feels very human
Michael Kennedy: this is very much on brand so i thought i put out there i feel like it's a little bit seminal
Michael Kennedy: and in terms of this um ars technica has a write-up as as well and it's gathered almost 200
Michael Kennedy: comments so that's worth checking out yeah yeah i'm curious why folks the folks who are in the
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: never AI camp are not using it even for completion do they never use it and I mean I held out on IDEs
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: for a long time because I didn't feel like I needed the autocomplete but like that those days are long
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: gone like this things have gotten so fast and have helped me like streamline my workflow where it's
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: not standing in my way and I feel like these tools will get into that point where it is just like
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: wrapping a amazing exoskeleton around your capabilities and going for it and doing more
Michael Kennedy: and better. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember the numbers. I don't know. I don't believe they're
Michael Kennedy: in here, but they might be in a fall. I mean, there's a conversation to be had. You can see,
Michael Kennedy: if you look at the art, the thread, but I believe it's something like this Shashanko thing is like
Michael Kennedy: 15% false positives, but 85% like, yeah, these are actual bugs that you didn't have to find.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I just told you they're bugs here. Yeah. And these people have all written helper scripts
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: to do these kinds of things. They can't be against this one. Yeah. I mean, they can,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: but it doesn't make any sense.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah, I just, I feel like if you've got a tool
Michael Kennedy: that by the time you get to the PR,
Michael Kennedy: it has an 85% accuracy rate of finding
Michael Kennedy: and dealing with any of the issues.
Michael Kennedy: Like, that's pretty good.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, pretty good.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Plus you're still expected to operate as a human
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: in this case, like bringing the creativity,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: bringing the original thought,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: just letting it take care of all the mundane, boring stuff.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Like making sure you cross your T's
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and dotted your I's in the code.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Seems like all went.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: All went to me.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: 100%.
Michael Kennedy: Speaking of when, wouldn't it be awesome if HTML did better stuff?
Michael Kennedy: Like they didn't stop building it when soon as JavaScript was invented in the 90s or whatever it was.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, so our third Django-related news item for the day is that the Django Steering Council is backing the Triptych Project.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So if you're not familiar with the Triptych Project, it is three proposals for the HTML standard to make things a little more native and expressive.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So adding in, for example, put patch and delete methods to forms.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: We've all abused post far too long and added in things like slash delete to the end of our API URLs to accomplish things that really should just be using a specific vocabulary or verb from HTTP language, which is delete.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So this gives us the ability to put those three extra actions.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: The fact that button actions should be a thing.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So buttons that just can fire HTTP requests without wrapping them in a form.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: How many times have you had a singleton button with form on top, form on the bottom?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Or worse, like for example, if you're not using a button, but dressing up a link to
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: look like a button, for example, like a logout, the logout button could potentially get triggered
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: by some of the prefetch operations that are happening by some of the browsers or unfurling,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: et cetera.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So you may get unexpectedly log out or unexpectedly delete something.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Be careful when you make a button that says delete, that is actually a link.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Those buttons should be buttons.
Michael Kennedy: There was actually back in internet lore, there was a really interesting thing.
Michael Kennedy: I think at the early days of Wikipedia, that one of the delete buttons was actually just
Michael Kennedy: an Ahrefs that went to a delete operator, but did a Git and got indexed and deleted a bunch
Michael Kennedy: of Wikipedia.
Michael Kennedy: I think it was Wikipedia.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: idea. Yep. So the idea is, yeah, let's, let's resimplify, make things more semantically
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: operational in the way that we should expect them to work. The last thing, the last proposal
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: is actually around partial page replacements. So if you are taking the ideas from basically HTMX,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Unpoly, and Turbo, and putting them into the HTML standard itself. So this means if the standard
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: gets adopted and the browser start putting this into their HTML parser and engine that's powering
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: your web browser, less JavaScript and libraries can actually be shipped to get the same level of
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: interactivity on the pages that we're doing right now today with things like HTMX. I really like
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the HTMX library. I feel like it gives people a clean, clear way to do things in Django really
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: fast and have like a single page web app like front end without having to rebuild all of your
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Django models in React on the front end.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Like with a lot of the React patterns,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you are building the same models twice,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the same routers twice, the same application basically
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: has to be built and maintained in two separate frameworks.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Where if you just had these capabilities built
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: right into HTMX or the browser, I mean,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: with this triptych project proposals for the HTML spec,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: well, think about how clean and this is simple
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: that the development could be,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: especially for testing out and running quick little one-off projects.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: They could be so much less dependencies, hopefully less maintenance going on in there.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So I think that's really nice.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: The piece is relevant for Django.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Django is here to help shepherd in the better web and new technologies for it.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So that's why they're backing the Triptych project specifically.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: But also, for example, the Django 6 introduced template parcels,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: which are inspired by these patterns.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So Django is kind of already ready to have this work.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So if you're using HTML,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you get some benefit that Django helps you generate these partials right out of
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the box, which is another one of the nice things about Django.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It's kind of that batteries included, all the things just work.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: If you want to help, there's links here to the Triptych project,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: which if you are familiar with the web hypertext community,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the what we G, I don't know how you pronounce that specifically,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: But this is basically taken over from the W3C for the HTML standards.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And so they have submitted a proposal to this working group, which is basically the living
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: HTML standard, which is where browser companies now build from and based off of.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: That's what they've put forth.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: This has been put forth by Carson Gross and Alex Petros.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So if you may recognize some of those names, one of them is the creator of HTML itself.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And if we go into the Triptych project, you can see there's the three proposals here,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: plus a blog post I linked to,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and some of the examples of why this is actually important,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and some of the history around it.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: If you wanna get involved,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I think that's actually the more relevant call to action here,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: is they're looking for folks
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: to send non-binding letters of support
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: on company letterhead that they would be willing to support
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and sponsor these proposals and help weigh in on that issue.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So there's a GitHub issue,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: that whole living HTML spec
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: is actually maintained as a GitHub repository.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: anyone can join. It's not an exclusive club of enterprises and corporations anymore driving that
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: living HTML spec. It's driven by the community itself. So if you get excited about this, go get
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: involved, go check it out. I look forward to this being the future of browsers because we can now,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: especially for simple things, oh boy, would this be just nice to have this built in.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah. It kind of fills the role that jQuery used to, you know, and we got past it because it's like,
Michael Kennedy: oh no, we need to build this huge front end stuff.
Michael Kennedy: And sometimes you just need, when I click this,
Michael Kennedy: that thing over there to change,
Michael Kennedy: but the rest of the page to stay.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I mean, I've wanted this for like two decades.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Like the fact that the button couldn't just fire an action,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: like having that wiring, it just makes sense.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: And I think this makes sense for getting things cleaned up
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and having less workarounds means that
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: agentic coding tools can actually operate better
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: because they'll have a better understanding
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: of the semantics of this.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: They appreciate semantics where things are wired up
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and work as you expect them to.
Michael Kennedy: Yeah. And if you like things like HTMX and Datastar and those kinds of frameworks, this just brings it natively to the browsers closer.
Michael Kennedy: There's still layers to add on top of it, but less.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: I'm excited to see the Django community getting behind this.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: There's still innovation happening on a 25-year-old project.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Incredible, right?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Yeah, it is. What do you got for extras today, Michael?
Michael Kennedy: I have a couple of things here, two things, and just a little bit of a follow-up to what I know
Michael Kennedy: your extra is going to be, but I'm going to wait. It's going to be a multi-staged extra, let's say.
Michael Kennedy: All right.
Michael Kennedy: I am a fan of the Granian web framework, powers Python, bytes,.fm, and many, many other things.
Michael Kennedy: It's a Rust-based HTTP server for Python, like think G, Unicorn, Uvicorn, that type of thing.
Michael Kennedy: and it's been around for quite a while.
Michael Kennedy: It's quite active.
Michael Kennedy: It's getting a lot of updates on it.
Michael Kennedy: More importantly, let's see.
Michael Kennedy: Where will one, this is Nazi.
Michael Kennedy: I need to learn, work on my Rust.
Michael Kennedy: Go to the cargo lock.
Michael Kennedy: More importantly, it wraps this thing called Hyper.
Michael Kennedy: And if you look at Hyper,
Michael Kennedy: that's like, it's a web server out of the Rust world
Michael Kennedy: that has like 130,000 stars.
Michael Kennedy: So basically this is like a WSGI and ASGI server
Michael Kennedy: that just kind of provides hyper to Python applications, right?
Michael Kennedy: Cool, cool.
Michael Kennedy: So what am I talking about?
Michael Kennedy: I've had Giovanni on the show and stuff before,
Michael Kennedy: but there's a pretty big update to it,
Michael Kennedy: even though it's just a 2.7.9.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: But it sounds like, ah, whatever.
Michael Kennedy: But, you know, I fixed a bug in the blocking thread pool schedule,
Michael Kennedy: causing starvation under scaling with WSGI and long running requests.
Michael Kennedy: Like, so if you're using this, just bump it up.
Michael Kennedy: That's easy.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Easy to do.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you should easy to do it sounds like it would make a big difference you should definitely do that
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: the next one i'm going to reshare my screen here okay do a live demo if i can find the stinking
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: window there we go so i really enjoy doom doom was originally coded up and created on the next step
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: os and the next machine since i actually have two next machines on my desk that have doom installed
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: on them. I have Doom installed my iPad, but now I can have Doom installed in the terminal. And
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: instead of usually people are saying, does it run Doom? Like that's the joke that people say,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: can that piece of hardware run Doom? This is a little different. This is your Doom running in
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: SQLite. So DoomQL, you can see here, select star from hell. So if you're a fan of the game,
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: that joke should land. But basically the frame buffer is a SQL query. So if we actually come in
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: over here and I'll run the demo make make run. This is Doom running in my frame buffer, but the
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: frame buffer is running in SQLite. So it uses the same standard wasad key combos. You can go and
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: grab like power ups. There are monsters in here someplace. It is incredible. Yeah, it's tricky.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It's a little trick. Oh, see, I'm getting like killed by. Oh, there's a monster right there.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It just is killing me as we go. This is running SQLite. You can actually tail the SQL queries
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: and watch all the queries that are happening under the covers
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: if you had another window open and ran the make inspect command.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So definitely check that out.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: It is hilarious to see that we have got Doom running in SQLite.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: So not just on fancy hardware, on crazy databases.
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Now we can run Doom.
Michael Kennedy: How incredible.
Michael Kennedy: That is super, super neat.
Michael Kennedy: So that's what I had to go check it out.
Michael Kennedy: I don't know how I feel about it, but yeah, Doom.
Michael Kennedy: I used to play a lot of Doom when I was much, much younger.
Michael Kennedy: Much younger.
Michael Kennedy: I also have another real-time follow-up.
Michael Kennedy: How can you possibly play Doom?
Michael Kennedy: One of my earliest jobs was working in this place called Eye Tracking,
Michael Kennedy: E-Y-E tracking, at eye tracking.com in San Diego.
Michael Kennedy: And we did all this crazy type of research by looking at what people would see
Michael Kennedy: and how their eyes would react as they were solving problems and so on.
Michael Kennedy: So we had these weird collaborations.
Michael Kennedy: And one of the collaborations was this guy, I don't remember,
Michael Kennedy: it was like a university or something, who did stuff with EEG, I think it was,
Michael Kennedy: not EKG, the brain bit, not the heart bit, with the wires.
Michael Kennedy: And so somehow wanted to kind of understand the eye tracking side and the EEG side.
Michael Kennedy: What does this have to do with Doom?
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: Well, he would play it by thinking with an EEG, no hands.
Michael Kennedy: And he would just think and it would turn left and they would think something else and it
Michael Kennedy: would shoot a gun.
Michael Kennedy: But what was really weird was he wouldn't think turn left and it would turn left.
Michael Kennedy: He'd have to activate different parts of his brain.
Michael Kennedy: So he's like bacon, bacon, bacon.
Michael Kennedy: with stars you you know what i mean like because yeah it couldn't just be the same part with motor
Michael Kennedy: skills it'd have to be like a different part like a like an xbox controller of the brain
Michael Kennedy: anyway i thought people might find that amazing that's really really weird doom's got quite a bit
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: of history with uh the computer world and computer science world too yes exactly exactly all right
Michael Kennedy: let's talk about jokes i'm sure there's a bug in doom so i named this joke solving all the bugs have
Michael Kennedy: Have you seen this?
Michael Kennedy: No, I've not.
Michael Kennedy: Have you looked at?
Michael Kennedy: Okay, good.
Michael Kennedy: I didn't peek.
Michael Kennedy: Good.
Michael Kennedy: So I want you to put yourself in the state of, I don't know, some apocalyptic future whenever
Michael Kennedy: the matrix was set with Neo and Morpheus and all that.
Michael Kennedy: Okay.
Michael Kennedy: So how, in this kind of world, how would you solve the bugs?
Michael Kennedy: Well, it says no production incident ever exists without Jira ticket.
Michael Kennedy: So what if Jira tickets are the issues all along?
Michael Kennedy: there is no jira there is no spoon everything is perfect all right oh boy i'm ready to take the red
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: pill yeah let's take it thanks there is no spoon yeah you bet you bet that's amazing especially
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: your keanu reeves impression uh very i tried i tried yeah thank you very spot well thank you for
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: joining us this week for uh python bites all the news all the time and i'm looking forward to seeing
Calvin Hendryx-Parker: you all next week we'll see you later