Tag Archives: conference

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

curl up 2018 summary

curl up 2018

The event that occurred this past weekend was the second time we gathered a bunch of curl enthusiasts and developers in the same physical room to discuss the past, the present and the future from a curl perspective.

Stockholm, Sweden, was the center of gravity this time when Goto 10 hosted our merry collective. Spring has finally arrived here and as the sun was out a lot, it made it a lovely weekend weather wise too. As a bonus, the little coffee shop on the premises was open all through both days. Just for us!

This time we were 22 peeps coming in from Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain, the US, and Czechia.

This is what it looked like (photos by me):

Talks

We had a bunch of presentations over the two days, done by a bunch of people. I recorded the screens and recorded the voice on most of them, and they’re available online. (Apologies for only recording a part of the screen for many of them!)

The talks were around how things work in curl or in the curl project, how people have used curl and a bit about upcoming technologies that we hope to get curl to support (soon?): QUIC, DOH, Alt-Svc, tests, CI, proxies, libcurl in Apache, using curl on a CDN, fuzzing curl, parsing email with curl etc.

Quiz

We rounded off the Saturday with a twelve question curl quiz. The winner, Fernando, managed to hit the right answer in 8 questions and did it faster than the competition. He got himself a signed copy of Everything curl the second print edition as a prize!

Sponsors

46 Elks was graciously sponsoring us with awesome food and t-shirts.

Sticker Mule provided us with stickers.

Goto 10 let us occupy their place during the weekend when it is otherwise closed!

This event was possible only thanks to their help!

2019

Several people asked me about next year already. I certainly hope we can run another curl up in 2019, but I don’t know yet where this should happen. Ideally, I would like to move it around to different countries to give different people the ability to show up easier, but I also value having a local “host” that can provide the room and facilities for us. I’ll send out probing questions about the 2019 location later this year. If you have a usable office or another suitable place that could host us, (preferably outside of Germany or Sweden), feel most welcome and encouraged to contact me!

(me, photographed by Christian Schmitz)

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

curl up in Stockholm 2018

Welcome all curl hackers and fans to Stockholm 2018! We are hosting the curl up developers conference April 14-15 2018 in my home city in what now might really become an annual tradition. Remember Nuremberg 2017?

All details are collected and updated on the curl up 2018 wiki page:

curl-up-2018

curl up 2018  will be another two full days event over a weekend and we will make an effort to keep the attendance fee at a minimum.

Presentations by core curl contributors on how things work, what we’ve done lately, what we’re working on how, what we should work on in the future and blue-sky visions about what curl should become when it grows up. Everyone attending are encouraged to present something. All this, mixed with lots of discussions, Q&As and socializing.

This time, I hope you will also have the chance to arrive early and spend the Friday, or a part of it, working hands-on with other curl developers on actual programming/debugging curl features or bugs. The curl-hacking-Friday? While not firmly organized yet, I’d like to see this become reality. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested to participate on.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in curl, curl development or how to best use curl in application or solutions. Here’s your chance to learn a lot and an excellent opportunity to influence the future of curl. And to get some short glimpses of a spring-time Stockholm when going back and forth to the curl up venue!

Sign up?

We will open up the “ticket booth” in January/February 2018, so just keep your eyes and ears open and you won’t miss it! The general idea is to keep the fee at a minimum, ideally zero. Currently the exact price depends on how we manage to cover the remaining costs with friendly sponsors.

Sponsor us!

We are looking for sponsors. If your company is interested and willing to help us out, in any capacity, please contact me! Remember that our project has no funds of its own and we have no particular company backing.

Where in Stockholm exactly?

We will spend the curl up 2018 weekend at Goto 10, which is near both the Skanstull and Gullmarsplan subway stations.

Action photo from curl up 2017 when Kamil Dudka spoke about Redhat’s use of curl built with NSS.

Firefox, Network, Technology

Talk: web transport, today and tomorrow

At the Netnod spring meeting 2017 in Stockholm on the 5th of April I did a talk with the title of this post.

Why was HTTP/2 introduced, how well has HTTP/2 been deployed and used, did it deliver on its promises, where doesn’t HTTP/2 perform as well. Then a quick (haha) overview on what QUIC is and how it intends to fix some of the shortcomings of HTTP/2 and TCP. In 28 minutes.

cURL and libcurl

curl up in Nuremberg!

I’m very happy to announce that the curl project is about to run our first ever curl meeting and developers conference.

March 18-19, Nuremberg Germany

Everyone interested in curl, libcurl and related matters is invited to participate. We only ask of you to register and pay the small fee. The fee will be used for food and more at the event.

You’ll find the full and detailed description of the event and the specific location in the curl wiki.

The agenda for the weekend is purposely kept loose to allow for flexibility and unconference-style adding things and topics while there. You will thus have the chance to present what you like and affect what others present. Do tell us what you’d like to talk about or hear others talk about! The sign-up for the event isn’t open yet, as we first need to work out some more details.

We have a dedicated mailing list for discussing the meeting, called curl-meet, so please consider yourself invited to join in there as well!

Thanks a lot to SUSE for hosting!

Feel free to help us make a cool logo for the event!

good_curl_logo

(The 19th birthday of curl is suitably enough the day after, on March 20.)

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Mozilla, Web

A workshop Monday

http workshopI decided I’d show up a little early at the Sheraton as I’ve been handling the interactions with hotel locally here in Stockholm where the workshop will run for the coming three days. Things were on track, if we ignore how they got the wrong name of the workshop on the info screens in the lobby, instead saying “Haxx Ab”…

Mark welcomed us with a quick overview of what we’re here for and quick run-through of the rough planning for the days. Our schedule is deliberately loose and open to allow for changes and adaptations as we go along.

Patrick talked about the 1 1/2 years of HTTP/2 working in Firefox so far, and we discussed a lot around the numbers and telemetry. What do they mean and why do they look like this etc. HTTP/2 is now at 44% of all HTTPS requests and connections using HTTP/2 are used for more than 8 requests on median (compared to slightly over 1 in the HTTP/1 case). What’s almost not used at all? HTTP/2 server push, Alt-Svc and HTTP 308 responses. Patrick’s presentation triggered a lot of good discussions. His slides are here.

RTT distribution for Firefox running on desktop and mobile, from Patrick’s slide set:

rtt-dist

The lunch was lovely.

Vlad then continued to talk about experiences from implementing and providing server push at Cloudflare. It and the associated discussions helped emphasize that we need better help for users on how to use server push and there might be reasons for browsers to change how they are stored in the current “secondary cache”. Also, discussions around how to access pushed resources and get information about pushes from javascript were briefly touched on.

After a break with some sweets and coffee, Kazuho continued to describe cache digests and how this concept can help making servers do better or more accurate server pushes. Back to more discussions around push and what it actually solved, how much complexity it is worth and so on. I thought I could sense hesitation in the room on whether this is really something to proceed with.

We intend to have a set of lightning talks after lunch each day and we have already have twelve such suggested talks listed in the workshop wiki, but the discussions were so lively and extensive that we missed them today and we even had to postpone the last talk of today until tomorrow. I can already sense how these three days will not be enough for us to cover everything we have listed and planned…

We ended the evening with a great dinner sponsored by Mozilla. I’d say it was a great first day. I’m looking forward to day 2!

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Web

HTTP Workshop 2016, day -1

http workshop The HTTP Workshop 2016 will take place in Stockholm starting tomorrow Monday, as I’ve mentioned before. Today we’ll start off slowly by having a few pre workshop drinks and say hello to old and new friends.

I did a casual count, and out of the 40 attendees coming, I believe slightly less than half are newcomers that didn’t attend the workshop last year. We’ll see browser people come, more independent HTTP implementers, CDN representatives, server and intermediary developers as well as some friends from large HTTP operators/sites. I personally view my attendance to be primarily with my curl hat on rather than my Firefox one. Firmly standing in the client side trenches anyway.

Visitors to Stockholm these days are also lucky enough to arrive when the weather is possibly as good as it can get here with the warmest period through the summer so far with lots of sun and really long bright summer days.

News this year includes the @http_workshop twitter account. If you have questions or concerns for HTTP workshoppers, do send them that way and they might get addressed or at least noticed.

I’ll try to take notes and post summaries of each workshop day here. Of course I will fully respect our conference rules about what to reveal or not.

stockholm castle and ship

cURL and libcurl, Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

everybody runs this code all the time

I was invited to talk about curl at the recent FOSS North conference in Gothenburg on May 26th. It was the first time the conference ran, but I think it went smooth and the ~110 visitors seemed to have a good time. It was a single track and there was a fairly good and interesting mix of talkers and subjects I think. They’re already planning to make it return again in spring 2017, so if you’re into FOSS and you’re in the Nordic region, consider this event next year…

I took on the subject of talking about my hacker ring^W^Wcurl project insights. Here’s my slide set:

At the event I sat down and had a chat with Simon Campanello, a reporter at IDG Techworld here in Sweden who subsequently posted this article about curl (in Swedish) and how our code has ended up getting used so widely.

photo of me from the Techworld article

cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source

Survey: a curl related event?

Call it a conference, a meetup or a hackathon. As curl is about to turn 18 years next month, I’m checking if there’s enough interest to try to put together a physical event to gather curl hackers and fans somewhere at some point. We’ve never done it in the past. Is the time ripe now?

Please tell us your views on this by filling out this survey that we run during this week only!

Mozilla, Network, Web

h2 performance at Velocity NYC

Tuesday October 13th 2015 I co-presented a talk at the Velocity conference in NYC together with Ragnar Lönn of Loadimpact. Ragnar is a friend of mine and another Swede.

Daniel and Ragnar at VelocityThe presentation was split up in two parts, in which I laid out the foundations of HTTP/2 in the first part, and Ragnar then presented the results of his performance study in the second part.

I think an interesting take away from the study is the following.

Existing sites are usually having a lot of resources that need to get downloaded. An average site has around one hundred now and the number is increasing. Those resources often have dependencies or trigger subsequent transfers. Like a HTML file gets parsed and then a CSS file is downloaded and once the CSS is downloaded it gets parsed and images specified in there are downloaded. It easily gets even more “steps” like that when downloading javascript, that triggers more javascript that renders parts of the page that causes more resources to get downloaded.

velocity room

Nothing new there, right? But when switching a site like that over to HTTP/2 the performance gain will be capped at a certain percentage no matter how large latency you have to the site because what limits such a site to perform well is the time it takes to get to the end of the slowest “dependency chain”. It is less of an issue with HTTP/1.1 since if the resources are from the same site, browsers won’t do more than 6 requests in parallel anyway (on the 6 separate TCP connections it’ll use).

It becomes evident that in order to make such a site really benefit from HTTP/2, the site would have to be modified ever so slightly so that it would deliver its contents with shorter chains and allow the browsers to get more of the resources earlier, in parallel rather than serially.

The actual talk

Splitting up a presentation in two parts with two talkers is more difficult than doing it yourself. I think we did a decent job and we ended the presentation early. It enabled us to answer to a lot of questions and we were actually quite bombarded with them – all relevant and well considered and I think we managed to bring more to the room thanks to them. A lot of the questions were about more generic HTTP/2 and deployments though and not all exactly about the performance study of the presentation.

The audience gave us an average score of 3.74 out of 5. Not too shabby. The room seated 360 persons but it wasn’t completely filled up.