Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Ryan welcomes Sebastian Gierlinger, VP of Engineering at Storyblok, to talk about how headless content management systems (CMS) fit into an increasingly componentized software landscape. They run through the differences between headless and traditional CMS systems (and databases), prototyping and security concerns, and how a team building distributed systems can get that precious velocity by decoupling their content from its rendering. 

Episode notes:

Storyblok provides a headless CMS they say is made for humans but built for the AI-driven era. 

Want to learn more about CMS design? Check out other pieces we’ve done with CMS providers Drupal and Builder.io. 

Connect with Sebastian on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Congrats to Populist badge winner Răzvan Flavius Panda for dropping an amazing answer on How do I change the maintenance database for Postgres?.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. Levie joins Big Technology to discuss the reports that a vast majority of businesses are not getting a return on their AI investments. Levie shares his takeaways from the reports, gives a rebuttal, and discusses the reality on the ground. Stay tuned for the second half where we separate hype from reality in the AI agent conversation. Tune in for a wide-ranging, post-Boxworks deep dive on where AI is heading in the coming years.

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Jens Neuse grew up in Germany, originally planning to be a carpenter. In his 2nd year as an apprentice, he was in a motorcycle wreck that thrust him into a process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's and eventually - GraphQL federation. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 young kids. He loves to sit ski on the mountain - which is the coolest carbon fiber chair on a ski, where you steer with your knees and hips.

After chasing building a better Apollo, Jens and his team ran into a point where their prior product and company was doomed to go under. When they accepted this fact, they started to think about what people actually wanted - and started to dig into the federation of GraphQL.

This is the creation story of Wundergraph.

Sponsors

• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://wundergraph.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jens-neuse-706673195

Ryan chats with  Karen Ng, EVP of Product at HubSpot, to chat about Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how they implemented it for their server for their CRM product. They chat the emergence of this as the standard for agentic interactions, the challenges of implementing the server and integrating it with their ecosystem, and how agentic AI has affected work at Hubspot. 

Episode notes:

Hubspot is a customer-relationship management (CRM) platform that aims to help businesses grow. 

MCP is an open-source protocol for connecting AI agents to external systems, originally developers at Anthropic. 

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn. 

Virtual hi-five to Rob Truxal for asking What is the purpose of "pip install --user ..."? and garnering themselves a Stellar Question badge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• * Mozilla’s Lifeline is Safe After Judge’s Google Antitrust Ruling*
• * troml - suggests or fills in trove classifiers for your projects*
• * pqrs: Command line tool for inspecting Parquet files*
• * Testing for Python 3.14*
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

• Our courses at Talk Python Training
• The Complete pytest Course
• Patreon Supporters

Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
• Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

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Michael #1: Mozilla’s Lifeline is Safe After Judge’s Google Antitrust Ruling

• A judge lets Google keep paying Mozilla to make Google the default search engine but only if those deals aren’t exclusive.
• More than 85% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google search payments.
• The ruling forbids Google from making exclusive contracts for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini, and forces data sharing and search syndication so rivals get a fighting chance.

Brian #2: troml - suggests or fills in trove classifiers for your projects

• Adam Hill
• This is super cool and so welcome.
• Trove Classifiers are things like <code>Programming Language :: Python :: 3.14</code> that allow for some fun stuff to show up in PyPI, like the versions you support, etc.
• Note that just saying you require 3.9+ doesn’t tell the user that you’ve actually tested stuff on 3.14. I like to keep Trove Classifiers around for this reason.
• Also, License classifier is deprecated, and if you include it, it shows up in two places, in Meta, and in the Classifiers section. Probably good to only have one place. So I’m going to be removing it from classifiers for my projects.
• One problem, classifier text has to be an exact match to something in the classifier list, so we usually recommend copy/pasting from that list.
• But no longer! Just use troml!
• It just fills it in for you (if you run troml suggest --fix). How totally awesome is that!
• I tried it on pytest-check, and it was mostly right. It suggested me adding 3.15, which I haven’t tested yet, so I’m not ready to add that just yet. :)
• BTW, I talked with Brett Cannon about classifiers back in ‘23 if you want some more in depth info on trove classifiers.

Michael #3: pqrs: Command line tool for inspecting Parquet files

• pqrs is a command line tool for inspecting Parquet files
• This is a replacement for the parquet-tools utility written in Rust
• Built using the Rust implementation of Parquet and Arrow
• pqrs roughly means "parquet-tools in rust"
• Why Parquet?
  • Size
    • A 200 MB CSV will usually shrink to somewhere between about 20-100 MB as Parquet depending on the data and compression. Loading a Parquet file is typically several times faster than parsing CSV, often 2x-10x faster for a full-file load and much faster when you only read some columns.
  • Speed
    • Full-file load into pandas: Parquet with pyarrow/fastparquet is usually 2x–10x faster than reading CSV with pandas because CSV parsing is CPU intensive (text tokenizing, dtype inference).
      • Example: if read_csv is 10 seconds, read_parquet might be ~1–5 seconds depending on CPU and codec.
    • Column subset: Parquet is much faster if you only need some columns — often 5x–50x faster because it reads only those column chunks.
    • Predicate pushdown & row groups: When using dataset APIs (pyarrow.dataset) you can push filters to skip row groups, reducing I/O dramatically for selective queries.
    • Memory usage: Parquet avoids temporary string buffers and repeated parsing, so peak memory and temporary allocations are often lower.

Brian #4: Testing for Python 3.14

• Python 3.14 is just around the corner, with a final release scheduled for October.
• What’s new in Python 3.14
• Python 3.14 release schedule
• Adding 3.14 to your CI tests in GitHub Actions
  • Add “3.14” and optionally “3.14t” for freethreaded
  • Add the line allow-prereleases: true
• I got stuck on this, and asked folks on Mastdon and Bluesky
• A couple folks suggested the allow-prereleases: true step. Thank you!
• Ed Rogers also suggested Hugo’s article Free-threaded Python on GitHub Actions, which I had read and forgot about. Thanks Ed! And thanks Hugo!

Extras

Brian:

• dj-toml-settings : Load Django settings from a TOML file. - Another cool project from Adam Hill
• LidAngleSensor for Mac - from Sam Henri Gold, with examples of creaky door and theramin
• Listener Bryan Weber found a Python version via Changelog, pybooklid, from tcsenpai
• Grab PyBay

Michael:

• Ready prek go! by Hugo van Kemenade

Joke: Console Devs Can’t Find a Date

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Apple's impressive new iPhone Pro models 2) Who is the iPhone Air for? 3) Has the phone reached its ultimate form factor 4) Is generative AI threatening to upend the smartphone market 5) Meta's new smartglasses are coming 6) Nepal's Gen Z overthrows the government and picks a new leader on Discord 7) OpenAI growth stats after GPT-5 launch 8) Oracle and OpenAI's new $300 billion deal 9) Flirting with ChatGPT 10) The AI companionship use case is real 11) Does San Francisco have 996 work culture?

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Ryan welcomes Geraint North, AI and developer platforms fellow at Arm, to dive into the impact of GenAI on chip design, Arm’s approach to designing flexible CPU architectures, and the challenges of optimizing large language models at the chip level for edge devices. 

Episode notes: 

Arm is a global compute platform that allows the world’s leading technology companies to innovate and deliver AI experiences.

Arm just announced their Lumex CSS Platform, which provides a complete compute subsystem platform for mobile and desktop providers to enable efficient AI workloads. 

Connect with Geraint on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifejacket badge winner I.sh., who won the badge for answering How to take screenshot on failure.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dustin Haisler, State and Local Government expert and President of e.Republic joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolving landscape of state and local government. Together, we dive into the findings from the 2025 Adobe Digital Government Index and explore the tension between rising citizen expectations and governments’ ability to keep pace. From AI adoption and accessibility mandates to cloud modernization, workforce challenges, and shifting federal-to-state responsibilities, we unpack the trends shaping public sector innovation. We also discuss how states are addressing technical debt, why building strong digital foundations is critical for AI success, and how leaders can move from pilots to enterprise rollouts with confidence.

Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.

While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.

This is Simon's creation story at Azul.

Sponsors

• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.azul.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritter/