Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Crom Carmichael, a government contracting entrepreneur, investor, and historian joins the show to explore what a truly efficient government could look like and what history has shown us to be the best way achieve one. We discuss his journey into political philosophy and the creation of his educational platform, Giants of Political Thought, and dive into the historical roots of government. Finally, we unpack the evolution of the U.S. healthcare system, the impact of tax policy on public services, and the role of innovation—especially AI—in driving productivity.

Ryan welcomes Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, to explore the origins of Vue.js, the challenges faced during its development, and the project’s growth over a decade. They dive into potential integrations for AI, future developments for Vue.js, and the sustainability of open-source projects. 

Episode notes: 

Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework that’s approachable, performant, and versatile for building web user interfaces.

Check out what Evan and his team are doing to create the next generation of tooling at Void Zero. 

Vue was ranked as the eighth most-popular web framework in the 2025 Developer Survey. 

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Hari, who won for asking the question JavaScript - Track mouse position. 

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

Greg Shove was born in Canada, raised in Britain, and eventually moved to the United States. Through all of these places he lived, he learned to believe in equal access for people, never to quit, and to work hard and win - all of this, respectively. When he moved to California, he was told to visit the local grocery store to meet more tech people than he would in a year in Canada. After business school, he worked for Apple and has launched or participated in 7 startups. Outside of tech, he loves to BBQ Argentinian style, inspired by the chef Francis Mallman.

Six years ago, Greg started a company to teach people skills and how to become the best manager and executive they could be. The business did well, but mainly it was because of the pandemic. In 2023, he started playing with GPT, and he realized that he needed to pivot himself, and his business as well.

This is the creation story of Section.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.sectionai.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregshove

Anthony Aguirre is the executive director of the Future of Life Institute. He joins Big Technology to discuss how AI could fail in the worst case and whether our push toward increasingly autonomous, general systems puts control out of reach. Tune in to hear how agentic systems operating at superhuman speed complicate oversight, and why “just unplug it” is naive. Hit play for a cool‑headed, nuanced conversation with clear takeaways you can use to evaluate AI strategy, policy, and risk.

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Ravi Madabhushi finds that all of the stops along his professional journey were accidental. He grew up in a tiny village in the south of India - so small, it would take you 10 minutes to sprint across it, end to end. His goals back then were common - get a job, get married, etc. - but after he moved to Bangalore post school, he got acquainted with startups... and was hooked. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He enjoys playing tennis, badminton, and squash. He got introduced to squash when he was playing tennis, it started raining, and they were forced inside to play "inside tennis"... IE squash.

Ravi and his team had a successful exit from their prior company, and decided to give startups another go. They wanted to solve the authentication problem for builders wanting to focus on their product - not building auth. What they found was a new arena in the world of AI, agents, and authentication of everything in between.

This is the creation story of ScaleKit.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.scalekit.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravibits/

Wenjing Zhang, VP of Engineering, and Caleb Johnson, Principal Engineer at LinkedIn, sit down with Ryan to discuss how semantic search and AI have transformed LinkedIn’s job search feature. They explore the engineering efforts behind transitioning from keyword-based search and the impact of AI models on LinkedIn’s job seekers and employers.

Episode notes: 

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than one billion members.

Connect with Caleb on LinkedIn.

Connect with Wenjing on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Mattias Larsson, who won a Populist badge for answering Singleton Class which requires some async call.

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

• Coverage.py regex pragmas
• * Python of Yore*
• * nox-uv*
• * A couple Django items*
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit

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.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: Coverage.py regex pragmas

• Ned Batchelder

• The regex implementation of how coverage.py recognizes pragmas is pretty amazing.

• It’s extensible through plugins

  • covdefaults adds a bunch of default exclusions, and also platform- and version-specific comment syntaxes.
  • coverage-conditional-plugin gives you a way to create comment syntaxes for entire files, for whether other packages are installed, and so on.

• A change from last year (as part of coverage.py 7.6 allows multiline regexes, which let’s us do things like:

  • Exclude an entire file with \\A(?s:.*# pragma: exclude file.*)\\Z
  • Allow start and stop delimiters with # no cover: start(?s:.*?)# no cover: stop
  • Exclude empty placeholder methods with ^\\s*(((async )?def .*?)?\\)(\\s*->.*?)?:\\s*)?\\.\\.\\.\\s*(#|$)
  • See Ned’s article for explanations of these

Michael #2: Python of Yore

• via Matthias
• Use YORE: ... comments to highlight CPython version dependencies.

  # YORE: EOL 3.8: Replace block with line 4.
  if sys.version_info < (3, 9):
  from astunparse import unparse
  else:
  from ast import unparse
  

Then check when they go out of support:

$ yore check --eol-within '5 months'
./src/griffe/agents/nodes/_values.py:11: Python 3.8 will reach its End of Life within approx. 4 months

Even fix them with fix .

Michael #3: nox-uv

• via John Hagen
• What nox-uv does is make it very simple to install uv extras and/or dependency groups into a nox session's virtual environment.
• The versions installed are constrained by uv's lockfile meaning that everything is deterministic and pinned.
• Dependency groups make it very easy to install only want is necessary for a session (e.g., only linting dependencies like Ruff, or main dependencies + mypy for type checking).

Brian #4: A couple Django items

• Stop Using Django's squashmigrations: There's a Better Way
  • Johnny Metz
  • Resetting migrations is sometimes the right thing.
  • Overly simplified summary: delete migrations and start over
• dj-lite
  • Adam Hill
  • Use SQLite in production with Django
  • “Simplify deploying and maintaining production Django websites by using SQLite in production. dj-lite helps enable the best performance for SQLite for small to medium-sized projects. It requires Django 5.1+.”

Extras

Brian:

• Test & Code 237: FastAPI Cloud with Sebastian Ramirez
  • will be out later today
• pythontest.com: pytest fixtures nuts and bolts - revisited
  • A blog series that I wrote a long time ago.
  • I’ve updated it into more managable bite-sized pieces, updated and tested with Python 3.13 and pytest 8

Michael:

• New course: Just Enough Python for Data Scientists
• My live stream about uv is now on YouTube
• Cursor CLI: Built to help you ship, right from your terminal.

Joke: Copy/Paste

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI's launch of GPT-5 2) Whether GPT-5's tool calling ability is its hidden strength 3) GPT-5 is good at 'doing stuff' 4) But GPT-5 is not AGI 5) Do AI models need more than book smarts to thrive? 6) OpenAI's medicine play 7) GPT-5's coding use case 8) We need AI tables for travel 9) Do the big model players now subsume AI startups? 10) Gemini has a breakdown

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Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com