#487: Building Rust Extensions for Python

Twenty years after a scrappy newsroom team hacked together a framework to ship stories fast, Django remains the Python web framework that ships real apps, responsibly. In this anniversary roundtable with its creators and long-time stewards: Simon Willison, Adrian Holovaty, Will Vincent, Jeff Triplet, and Thibaud Colas, we trace the path from the Lawrence Journal-World to 1.0, DjangoCon, and the DSF; unpack how a BSD license and a culture of docs, tests, and mentorship grew a global community; and revisit lessons from deployments like Instagram. We talk modern Django too: ASGI and async, HTMX-friendly patterns, building APIs with DRF and Django Ninja, and how Django pairs with React and serverless without losing its batteries-included soul. You’ll hear about Django Girls, Djangonauts, and the Django Fellowship that keep momentum going, plus where Django fits in today’s AI stacks. Finally, we look ahead at the next decade of speed, security, and sustainability.

29 Aug 1h 8min

Agentic AI programming is what happens when coding assistants stop acting like autocomplete and start collaborating on real work. In this episode, we cut through the hype and incentives to define “agentic,” then get hands-on with how tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and LangChain actually behave inside an established codebase. Our guest, Matt Makai, now VP of Developer Relations at DigitalOcean, creator of Full Stack Python and Plushcap, shares hard-won tactics. We unpack what breaks, from brittle “generate a bunch of tests” requests to agents amplifying technical debt and uneven design patterns. Plus, we also discuss a sane git workflow for AI-sized diffs. You’ll hear practical Claude tips, why developers write more bugs when typing less, and where open source agents are headed. Hint: The destination is humans as editors of systems, not just typists of code.

22 Aug 1h 17min

Python’s data stack is getting a serious GPU turbo boost. In this episode, Ben Zaitlen from NVIDIA joins us to unpack RAPIDS, the open source toolkit that lets pandas, scikit-learn, Spark, Polars, and even NetworkX execute on GPUs. We trace the project’s origin and why NVIDIA built it in the open, then dig into the pieces that matter in practice: cuDF for DataFrames, cuML for ML, cuGraph for graphs, cuXfilter for dashboards, and friends like cuSpatial and cuSignal. We talk real speedups, how the pandas accelerator works without a rewrite, and what becomes possible when jobs that used to take hours finish in minutes. You’ll hear strategies for datasets bigger than GPU memory, scaling out with Dask or Ray, Spark acceleration, and the growing role of vector search with cuVS for AI workloads. If you know the CPU tools, this is your on- ramp to the same APIs at GPU speed.

19 Aug 1h 5min

What if your code was crash-proof? That's the value prop for a framework called Temporal. Temporal is a durable execution platform that enables developers to build scalable applications without sacrificing productivity or reliability. The Temporal server executes units of application logic called Workflows in a resilient manner that automatically handles intermittent failures, and retries failed operations. We have Mason Egger from Temporal on to dive into durable execution.

11 Aug 1h 10min

Every year the core developers of Python convene in person to focus on high priority topics for CPython and beyond. This year they met at PyCon US 2025. Those meetings are closed door to keep focused and productive. But we're lucky that Seth Michael Larson was in attendance and wrote up each topic presented and the reactions and feedback to each. We'll be exploring this year's Language Summit with Seth. It's quite insightful to where Python is going and the pressing matters.

18 Juli 1h 13min

Why do people listen to this podcast? Sure, they're looking for technical explorations of new libraries and ideas. But often it's to hear the story behind them. If that speaks to you, then I have the perfect episode lined up. I have Barry Warsaw, Paul Everitt, Carol Willing, and Brett Cannon all back on the show to share stories from the history of Python. You'll hear about how import this came to be and how the first PyCon had around 30 attendees (two of whom are guests on this episode!). Sit back and enjoy the humorous stories from Python's past.

14 Juli 1h 8min

Do you like to dive into the details and intricacies of how Python executes and how we can optimize it? Well, do I have an episode for you. We welcome back Brandt Bucher to give us an update on the upcoming JIT compiler for Python and why it differs from JITs for languages such as C# and Java.

2 Juli 1h 8min

If you're doing data science and have mostly spent your time doing exploratory or just local development, this could be the episode for you. We are joined by Catherine Nelson to discuss techniques and tools to move your data science game from local notebooks to full-on production workflows.

25 Juni 54min