Most of the work done in actual programming jobs is taking structured data in some particular format from one system, slightly tweaking it, and sending it off to some other system. When exchanging data between different processes, it's almost always necessary to serialize it into a series of bytes which can be sent across a dumb byte-oriented transport (such as TCP). There are hundreds upon hundreds of different serialization formats out there, but I just wanted to talk about a few of the most common that folks use with the Python programming language.

All of these have the following properties …

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

We spend a lot of our time in the modern, web services-driven technology industry ignoring performance issues. What's the point of micro-optimizing a 3ms function call when each request spends 8 or 9 seconds inside the SQLAlchemy ORM? Well, sometimes it's nice to …