James Fuller was our man on the ground in Prague. He found the venue, organized most of the event and made it another curl up success. Thank you! The curl up series started in 2017 and is our annual curl developers meetup, but since it was converted to online only for a few years through Covid, this was only our fifth physical event.

We managed to cram in no less than sixteen curl related presentations over the weekend. Some fifteen eager hackers had gathered for this years event, as per usual a whole bunch of registered attendees decided to not show up. We did not let that stop us or bring us down.

In person

I think we all feel that there is value in meeting up in person every once in a while, as it helps us cooperate and work better together the rest of the time.

This time, a handful of the regular old-timers attended, and a number of less regular contributors and even a set of local interested hackers decided to take the opportunity – which is so lovely to see. We love to share our knowledge with others, and getting fresh eyes and feedback from people with different views and experiences helps us!

We talked. At the conference itself of course but also over lunches, dinners, coffee breaks and beers.

Recordings

We streamed the entire event live on Twitch and recorded all the sessions. Because we are a tiny team without any dedicated video enthusiasts etc, we of course ran into some technical snags that made us mostly botch the two initial talks (by me and Stefan Eissing) and then we gradually improved the recordings through the event. We still have fourteen talks on video now available on YouTube.

You can also head over to the curl up 2025 agenda page, and find links to the recorded talks and their corresponding slide-sets.

I have a fair idea now how we should go about this next year! And yeah, it probably involves me getting a new laptop that can actually handle the task a little gentler. At these times, my ten year old work horse certainly shows its age. It was not even considered powerful when it was new.

Sponsors

We reimburse travel and hotel expenses for top contributors to attend curl up and we make the event a free-to-attend one to remove friction and really not make it about the cost. We can only do this of course thanks to our awesome project sponsors.

Next time

We intend to run curl up again in 2026, but we do not yet know where. Ideally in another European capital that is easy reachable by plane. If you want to help us make it happen in your city, please reach out!