#489 Or JSON?

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

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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 librar