Show notes
Topics covered in this episode:
django-orjson
Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size
Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers
Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the show
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Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn
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Michael #1: django-orjson
Adam Johnson dropped django-orjson - drop-in replacements for the Django and DRF pieces that touch JSON, swapping stdlib json for orjson, the Rust-based library. Headline numbers: 10x faster serialization, 2x faster deserialization.
The interesting question is why this needs to be a package at all. pip install orjson is the easy part. Adam's actual pitch: adopting it "isn't easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts." Django scatters JSON across JsonResponse, the test client and test case classes, the json_script template tag, and more. There's no single hook to grab, so you get a library that catches them all.
Adam is refreshingly honest about the scale of the win. His words: "While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application's runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant." He calls it "a nearly free performance win" - not "this will 10x your app." That's a claim about cost, not magnitude, and it's worth keeping those straight.
Worth flagging what the post doesn't cover: caveats. There are none in the article, but orjson has real ones. Django and Flask both render datetimes as RFC 822 HTTP-date (Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT); orjson does ISO 8601. It can't do ensure_ascii, it rejects NaN and Infinity (which stdlib happily emits), and it raises on Decimal. If you've got a JS client parsing dates, that's a wire-format change.
Who should actually take this? If you're a DRF shop shoveling JSON all day, yes - it's cheap and it's real. If your app mostly renders HTML templates, you're optimizing a slice of runtime that's already near zero.
The problem Adam's package solves doesn't exist in Flask or Quart. They already centralize every JSON operation - jsonify, request.get_json(), the test client, the |tojson filter - behind one provider object at app.json. So there's no library to install. It's about ten lines:
import orjson
from quart.json.provider import JSONProvider # or flask.json.provider
class OrjsonProvider(JSONProvider):
def dumps(self, obj, **kwargs) -> str:
return orjson.dumps(obj).decode() # provider must return str
def loads(self, s, **kwargs):
return orjson.loads(s)
app.json = OrjsonProvider(app)
The numbers on talkpython.fm
Evaluated it, measured it, and skipped it. The biggest JSON payload we serve is our MCP server returning a cached episode transcript, about 139 KB. Swapping the provider saves 0.119 milliseconds per request. That total response takes 1.1 ms
We got 4.1x, not 10x - and the reason is the good lesson. Payload shape decides your speedup. The 10x is for structure-heavy data, lots of small keys where stdlib burns time in Python-level dispatch per item. Our hot payload is one giant transcript string, so the work is escaping and memcpy
Calvin #2: Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size
Peter Bengtsson revisits a classic: his 2017 "Fastest Redis configuration for Django" benchmark now has a 2026 update posted this week.
The 2017 post pitted django-redis serializers (json, ujson, msgpack, pickle) and compressors (zlib, lzma) against each other; conclusion was msgpack + zlib as the sweet spot - avoid the json serializer, it's fat and slow.
The 2026 update narrows focus to just compressors: default (no compression), zlib, lzma, and newcomer zstd.
New results: lzma compresses best but is slowest; zstd is the fastest compressor on Ubuntu; differences between them are very small.
Big takeaway across both: compression buys you a lot of space (2–3.5x smaller) for very little speed cost - worth it for Redis where memory is the constraint.
Caveat from the author: results depend heavily on your data - his test stores short strings of numbers, so benchmark your own workload.
Michael #3: Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers
Write up on Ars.
Really good coverage by Maximillian: Time to wake up (for some)
Torvalds said that “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.”
I agree with Max, putting your head in the sand and waiting for AI to go away will likely mean you won’t be working professionally in software development in the coming years.
The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an “agentic Linux kernel code review system” that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits.
“We’re not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it,” Torvalds said.
“Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time,” Torvalds wrote.
Calvin #4: Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project
Django Steering Council issued a Letter of Collaboration backing Carson Gross & Alex Petros's funding bid for the Triptych Project - three proposals to make HTML more expressive natively, in every browser.
The three additions: PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods for forms, button actions (buttons that fire HTTP requests without a wrapping form), and partial page replacement.
Distills the core ideas from HTMX/Unpoly/Turbo into the HTML standard itself - no JS, no library, nothing to ship or maintain.
Current focus is button actions (WHATWG #12330): <button action=/logout method=POST>Logout</button> instead of wrapping a button in a form.
Relevant to Django directly - think the admin submit row and disguised delete links; Django 6.0's template partials were already inspired by these patterns.
How to help: companies can send non-binding letters of support on letterhead; individuals can read the proposals and weigh in on the WHATWG issues.
Extras
Calvin:
DOOMQL - A playable first-person shooter whose framebuffer is a SQL query.
Michael:
Granian 2.7.9 fixes WSGI threadpool scheduler starvation/underscaling
Welcome Calvin post
Joke: Solving all bugs