Why FastAPI Became Python’s Fastest‑Growing Framework – Chat with Sebastián Ramírez

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/