What’s even the “gold standard” for logging stuff I guess?

structlog. Or just Structured Logging in general.

Don't do:

logging.info(f"{something} happened!")

But do

logging.info("thing-happened", thing=something)

Why? Your event will become a category, which means it's easily searchable/findable, you can output either human-readable stuff (the typical {date}, {loglevel}, {event}) or just straight up JSONL (a JSON object/dict per line). If you have JSON logs you can use jq to query/filter/manipulate your logs, if you have something like ELK, you can insert your logs there and create dashboards.

It's amazing - though it may break your brain initially.

That really depends on how much of it you're doing. If you're just handing a few times at a time, the difference between 0.1s and 3s isn't that big of a deal. If you're handling thousands or even millions in a day, it can be an order of magnitude cost savings to make it more efficient.

We use a CSVs at work, but it's not a common thing so we just use the built-in csv library. If we did more with it, pandas would be the way to go (or maybe we'd rewrite that service in Rust).

Also, regarding better formats: parquet is relatively nice. Smaller files, though not human readable. Use parquet if you read often, or have IO issues (file "too large" as CSV).