In this episode, I’m chatting with Thibaud Colas — Product Lead & Engineering Manager at Torchbox, Wagtail product lead, and current President of the Django Software Foundation. We talk about digital sustainability: why the internet’s energy use matters, how to measure it, why performance is important for emissions, whether rewriting everything in Rust is the only solution, and why we should keep AI businesses more accountable.

Outline

0:00 — Episode highlights

0:58 — Guest intro

1:21 — Is carbon footprint a popular topic among developers?

3:44 — What’s the carbon impact of the web and software in general?

5:35 — How can we measure a website’s carbon footprint?

8:26 — What are Django’s and Wagtail’s plans to reduce their footprint?

9:35 — Does the programming language we use (e.g., Python or Rust) make a difference?

11:42 — What practical steps can developers take to lower their software’s impact?

12:25 — How do we raise awareness and make sustainability a mainstream topic in tech?

15:34 — Should businesses be accountable for their software’s footprint?

16:59 — What should AI companies and cloud providers be more transparent about?

Episode links

– Sustainable Web Design (methodology): https://sustainablewebdesign.org/

– Wagtail CMS (Torchbox): https://wagtail.org/

– Django Software Foundation: https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/

– Climate Action Tech community: https://climateaction.tech/

– W3C work on web sustainability: https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/

What is digital sustainability and why does it matter?

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Thibaud Colas, Product Lead & Engineering Manager at Torchbox, Wagtail product lead, and current President of the Django Software Foundation. We talk about digital sustainability: why the internet’s energy use matters, how to measure it, why performance is important for emissions, whether rewriting everything in Rust is the only solution, and why we should keep AI businesses more accountable.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Sebastián Ramírez — the creator of FastAPI, Typer, and SQLModel, and founder of FastAPI Labs. FastAPI has become one of Python’s fastest-growing web frameworks (adoption jumped from 14% to 25% among developers between 2021 and 2023!), and we dig into how it got here and what’s next on the roadmap. Sebastián shares behind-the-scenes insights into its success, his take on developer experience, the story behind FastAPI Labs and FastAPI Cloud, and how he handles life in open source.

Outline

0:00 Why FastAPI Became So Popular

1:43 The Philosophy Behind FastAPI Development

3:18 Challenges of Maintaining a Popular Open Source Project

5:50 Community Contributions & Recognition System

8:42 FastAPI Roadmap

11:13 Amazing Use Cases - From Particle Accelerators to Space Research

12:29 FastAPI's Performance Architecture & Python Core Team

15:19 Meeting Your Heroes & Being Popular in the Community

16:30 Dealing with Negative Comments & Online Criticism

23:25 FastAPI Cloud & FastAPI Labs Announcement

28:08 Deployment Challenges & Platform as a Service Solution

31:17 The SQLModel Challenge - Combining Old and New Magic

34:29 Thoughts on Education & Self-Taught Development

40:22 How to Contribute to FastAPI

42:33 Closing Thoughts

Episode links

– JetBrains Developers Survey 2023: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/python/#python_web_libs_two_years

– FastAPI documentation: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com

– Sebastián Ramírez’s website: https://tiangolo.com

– FastAPI Labs (FastAPI Cloud): https://fastapilabs.com/

FastAPI has become one of Python’s fastest-growing web frameworks!

In this upcoming episode, I chat with Sebastián Ramírez, the creator of FastAPI, Typer, and SQLModel, and founder of FastAPI Labs. We talk about why FastAPI became so popular, the challenges of maintaining a fast-growing open source project, and what’s next for FastAPI and FastAPI Cloud.

Full episode coming out next week!

Have you ever wondered how a CPython release works? In this episode, I talk with Hugo van Kemenade, Pablo Galindo Salgado, and Łukasz Langa about CPython release management.

About the guests

• Hugo van Kemenade – Release Manager for Python 3.14 & 3.15, currently employed at the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow. Maintainer of open-source projects such as Pillow. Co-organizer of local Python events in Helsinki.
• Pablo Galindo Salgado – Core Python developer, currently employed in the Software Infrastructure department at Bloomberg. Release Manager for Python 3.10 & 3.11, and a member of the Steering Council. Co-host of the core.py podcast.
• Łukasz Langa – Python’s Developer in Residence at the PSF and Release Manager for Python 3.8 & 3.9. Creator of Black, the opinionated Python code formatter, and co-host of the core.py podcast.

Outline

01:34 Most & Least Successful Releases

05:34 Evolution of Release Process

11:37 Release Schedule and Annual Releases

15:05 Handling PRs and Reverts

18:07 Becoming a Python Release Manager

25:24 Motivation and Time Zone Challenges

29:36 Release Rituals and YouTube Party

35:11 Sustainable Open Source Funding Models

42:10 Getting Involved & Further Listening

🎙️ This episode was recorded live at EuroPython in July 2025 in Prague.

Episode links

- core.py podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1PGRfdrLEwgXjQbPBNk1pW

- Python’s Developer Guide https://devguide.python.org/

- PEP 101 https://peps.python.org/pep-0101/

Sneak peak of the episode about CPython release. Have you ever wondered how a CPython release works? In this episode, we talk with Hugo van Kemenade, Łukasz Langa, and Pablo Galindo Salgado about Python release management.

About the guests

• Hugo van Kemenade – Release Manager for Python 3.14 & 3.15, currently employed at the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow. Maintainer of open-source projects such as Pillow. Co-organizer of local Python events in Helsinki.
• Pablo Galindo Salgado – Core Python developer, currently employed in the Software Infrastructure department at Bloomberg. Release Manager for Python 3.10 & 3.11, and a member of the Steering Council. Co-host of the core.py podcast.
• Łukasz Langa – Python’s Developer in Residence at the PSF and Release Manager for Python 3.8 & 3.9. Creator of Black, the opinionated Python code formatter, and co-host of the core.py podcast.