On Friday May 3, 2024 I had several of my curl friends over for dinner in my house. An unusually warm and sunny spring day with a temperature reaching twenty degrees centigrade.

The curl up 2024 weekend started excellently and the following morning we all squeezed ourselves into a conference room in downtown Stockholm. I had rented a room in a hotel in the city center for two days.

curl up is never a big meeting/conference but we have in the past sometimes been around twenty-five attendees. This year’s amount of fifteen was the smallest so far, but in this small set of people we have a set of long-term well-known curl contributors. It is not a big list of attendees that creates a good curl up.

Swag

We started by making sure every attendee got their needs of curl t-shirts, curl mugs, curl stickers and curl coasters satisfied. The t-shirts of the year are “forest green” with the curl logo in white on the front and the curl symbol slightly larger on the back.

I have spare t-shirts that I intend to distribute to people I meet over the coming year. Before you ask: no, there is no way to buy these.

Recordings

I had tested my external microphone setup at home but it just refused to work when at the venue. We struggled for a while until we had to surrender and fall back to using the built-in microphone in the webcam that we used for recording the video. This is why the sound is low in all recordings we did. A little disappointing. Sorry for this.

I live-streamed the entire event over twitch. We had in total over 460 unique viewers over the days and at times at least we had over 30 concurrent sustained viewers. This made us at least sometimes have twice the size audience online as in the room. In spite of the sound issue.

I also noticed that my trusty old laptop was maybe a little weak for this purpose as it struggled to stream and save the recordings at high frame rates.

Day one

The state of curl 2024

Where are we, what did we do last year or so? Who did the work? How often? How much?

Evolutions

Apparently this is not a real word, but Stefan Eissing pushes for language development in this presentation where he talks about changes and improvements he worked on in curl over the last few years.

Fuzzing curl

James Fuller talks about his work on generating “fun” curl command lines in order to find those that might not be handled correctly.

Implementing parallel testing

Dan Fandrich talks about the journey from serial to fully parallel tests in curl.

curl containers

James is back and talks about where the curl containers are right now.

Security

I talk about the security situation in curl as of right now and the last year.

End of day 1

We topped off this packed day with a twenty minute walk through a sunny Stockholm down to the water where we could sit outside and have a few drinks before we moved over to the restaurant where we ended the evening with a joint dinner. A great first day!

Day two

The nice weather was gone. The temperature dropped ten degrees and the rain poured down most of this day.

HTTP/1/2/3 Performance

Stefan Eissing warms up the day. About his work on HTTP refactors and related performance improvements.

trurl

This is the newcomer in the curl family and I talked a little about what it is and why it exists.

Apple Specialties

Christian has improved curl on Apple devices, which he talks about.

rust in curl

You can build curl to use third party components written in rust. This is where we are now and what might happen next. Or not.

Test clutch

Dan talks about his work on improving curl tests and their reliability.

Future

We don’t know much about the future but there are some plans and there are at least some ideas…

End of curl up 2024

The rest of day two was mostly spent hanging out and talking about life, the universe and various things curl. People started leaving and by five o’clock we shut the door for the last time this time around. We had survived curl up 2024.

After all these talks, discussions, dinners, beers, coffees, challenging questions, brainstorms over 48 hours, I was exhausted and drained of energy. Apart from the recording problem, I think almost everything else in the event organization went as smoothly as we could have wished for. The venue, the food, the coffee etc worked perfectly for us.

Planning ahead for 2025

We will most certainly run another curl up event in 2025 in roughly the same frame of the year as we did now. The idea is then to visit another capital city in Europe. Stay tuned for coming announcements of date and location for that.