Tag Archives: curlup

I survived curl up 2024

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.

curl up 2022 take 2

In June of 2022 we intended to run the curl up 2022 curl conference in person, in California.

Unfortunately, I had the bad taste of catching covid exactly when I was about to use my new US visa for the first time, so I had to remain at home and because of that we cancelled the whole event.

Try again

Now we try again. The curl up 2022 take 2 will be an all-virtual event that is going to be a long Zoom-session with a number of presentations and discussion slots. Feel free to join in for what you want and stay away from the sessions that don’t interest you. We will make our best to keep the schedule, and the agenda will be available ahead of time for you to plan your attendance around.

On September 15, 2022 we will start the show at 15:00 CEST and we have a program that is a full day. Join when you want, leave, come back. You decide.

Sign up!

Agenda

The Agenda is almost complete. The presentations will be done live or be provided prerecorded. The prerecorded talks will still be discussed and have Q&As live afterwards.

Speak!

There is still room left to add some speakers. If you use curl/libcurl somewhere and want to tell us about things you’ve learned and things libcurl devs should learn, come do it! Or anything else that is related to curl or Internet transfers. Big or small – even just 5 minutes works!

This is a day for sharing info, spreading knowledge and having fun.

Attend!

Yeah, sign up and come hang out with us and watch a range of curl related talks. I think you will learn things and I think it will be a lot of fun.

The curl up hours spelled out in different time zones:

  • PDT 6:00 – 15:00 (US west coast)
  • EDT 9:00 – 18:00 (US east coast)
  • UTC 13:00 – 22:00
  • CEST 15:00 – 00:00 (central Europe)
  • IST 18:30 – 03:30 (India)
  • CST 21:00 – 06:00 (China)
  • JST 22:00 – 07:00 (Japan)
  • AEST 23:00 – 08:00 (Sidney, Autralia)
  • NZST 01:00 – 09:00 (New Zealand) (This is on the 16th)

curl up 2022 San Francisco

On June 6 2022, we will gather a bunch of curl aficionados in the Firehouse at the Fort Mason Centre in San Francisco, USA.

All details can be found here. We will add more info and details as we get closer to the event.

curl up is the annual curl developers and users “conference” where we meet up over a day and talk curl, curl related topics and share ideas about curl, its present and and its future. It is also really the only time of the year where we actually get to meet fellow curl hackers in person. The only day of the year that is completely devoted to curl. The best kind of day!

The last two years we have not run the conference for covid reasons but now we are back. The first time we arrange the event outside Europe.

I fully realize this geographic choice will prevent some of our European friends and contributors from attending, it will also allow North Americans to join the fun for the first time.

We help contributors attend

To better allow and encourage top curl contributors to attend this event, no matter where you live, we will help cover travel and lodging expenses for all and any top-100 curl committers who wants to come.

Sign up

Head over to the curl up 2022 page to find the link and details.

Agenda

Over the coming month I hope we can create an agenda with curl talks from several people. I need your ideas and your talks. We have started to collect some ideas for the 2022 agenda.

Tell us what you want to hear and what you want to share with us!

Who will be there?

I will of course be there and I hope we can attract a decent set of additional contributors, but also curl users and fans of all kinds and types.

Yes I can enter the country

Lots of you remember my struggles in the past to get permission to enter the US, but that was resolved a while ago. No problems remain.

Credits

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

curl up 2021

curl up 2021 happened today.

We had five presentations done, all prerecorded and made available before the event. At the Sunday afternoon we gathered to discuss the presentations and everything around those topics.

The presentations

  1. The state of curl 2021 – Daniel Stenberg
  2. curl security 2021 – Daniel Stenberg
  3. libcurl under the hood – Daniel Stenberg
  4. Interfacing rust – Stefan Eissing
  5. Curl profiling – Jim Fuller.

Discussions

We were not very many who actually joined the meeting, and out of the people in the meeting a majority decided to be spectators only and remained muted with their cameras off.

It turned out as a two hour long mostly casual talk among me, Stefan Eissing and Emil Engler about the presentations and related topics. Toward the end, Kamil Dudka appeared.

The three of us get to talk about roadmap items, tests, security, writing code that interfaces modules written in rust and what more details in the libcurl internals that could use further descriptions and documentation.

The video

The agenda in the video is roughly following the agenda order in the 2021 wiki page and the discussion topics mentioned there.

Sponsored

Thanks to wolfSSL for sponsoring the video meeting account used!

curl up 2020 goes online only

curl up 2020 will not take place in Berlin as previously planned. The corona times are desperate times and we don’t expect things to have improved soon enough to make a physical conference possible at this date.

curl up 2020 will still take place, and at the same date as planned (May 9-10), but we will change the event to a pure online and video-heavy occasion. This way we can of course also even easier welcome audience and participants from even furher away who previously would have had a hard time to participate.

We have not worked out the details yet. What tools to use, how to schedule, how to participate, how to ask questions or how to say cheers with your local favorite beer. If you have ideas, suggestions or even experiences to share regarding this, please join the curl-meet mailing list and help!

curl cheat sheet refresh

Several years ago I made a first version of a “curl HTTP cheat sheet” to facilitate the most common curl command line options when working with HTTP.

This has now been refreshed after I took lots of feedback from friends on twitter, and then worked on rearranging the lines and columns so that it got as compact as possible without sacrificing readability (too much).

See the updated online version here.

The curl HTTP cheat sheet, 2020 edition.

The plan is to make stickers out of this – and possibly t-shirts as well. I did some test prints and deemed that with a 125 mm width, all the text is still clearly readable.

If things go well, I’ll hand out these beauties at curl up 2020 and of course leftovers will then be given away to whoever I run into at other places and conferences where I bring stickers…

You’re invited to curl up 2020: Berlin

The annual curl developers conference, curl up, is being held in Berlin this year; May 9-10 2020.

Starting now, you can register to the event to be sure that you have a seat. The number of available seats is limited.

Register here

curl up is the main (and only?) event of the year where curl developers and enthusiasts get together physically in a room for a full weekend of presentations and discussions on topics that are centered around curl and its related technologies.

We move the event around to different countries every year to accommodate different crowds better and worse every year – and this time we’re back again in Germany – where we once started the curl up series back in 2017.

The events are typically small with a very friendly spirit. 20-30 persons

Sign up

We will only be able to let you in if you have registered – and received a confirmation. There’s no fee – but if you register and don’t show, you lose karma.

The curl project can even help fund your travel and accommodation expenses (if you qualify). We really want curl developers to come!

Register here

Date

May 9-10 2020. We’ll run the event both days of that weekend.

Agenda

The program is not done yet and will not be so until just a week or two before the event, and then it will be made available => here.

We want as many voices as possible to be heard at the event. If you have done something with curl, want to do something with curl, have a suggestion etc – even just short talk will be much appreciated. Or if you have a certain topic or subject you really want someone else to speak about, let us know as well!

Expect topics to be about curl, curl internals, Internet protocols, how to improve curl, what to not do in curl and similar.

Location

We’ll be in the co.up facilities in central Berlin. On Adalbertstraße 8.

Planning and discussions on curl-meet

Everything about the event, planning for it, volunteering, setting it up, agenda bashing and more will be done on the curl-meet mailing list, dedicated for this purpose. Join in!

The Stockholm edition.

Anti Google?

If you have a problem with filling in the Google-hosted registration form, please email us at curlup@haxx.se instead and we’ll ask you for the information over email instead.

Credits

The images were taken by me, Daniel. The top one at the Nuremburg curl up in 2017, the in-article photo in Stockholm 2018.

curl up 2019 is over

(I will update this blog post with more links to videos and PDFs to presentations as they get published, so come back later in case your favorite isn’t linked already.)

The third curl developers conference, curl up 2019, is how history. We gathered in the lovely Charles University in central Prague where we sat down in an excellent class room. After the HTTP symposium on the Friday, we spent the weekend to dive in deeper in protocols and curl details.

I started off the Saturday by The state of the curl project (youtube). An overview of how we’re doing right now in terms of stats, graphs and numbers from different aspects and then something about what we’ve done the last year and a quick look at what’s not do good and what we could work on going forward.

James Fuller took the next session and his Newbie guide to contributing to libcurl presentation. Things to consider and general best practices to that could make your first steps into the project more likely to be pleasant!

Long term curl hacker Dan Fandrich (also known as “Daniel two” out of the three Daniels we have among our top committers) followed up with Writing an effective curl test where the detailed what different tests we have in curl, what they’re for and a little about how to write such tests.

Sign seen at the curl up dinner reception Friday night

After that I was back behind the desk in the classroom that we used for this event and I talked The Deprecation of legacy crap (Youtube). How and why we are removing things, some things we are removing and will soon remove and finally a little explainer on our new concept and handling of “experimental” features.

Igor Chubin then explained his new protect for us: curlator: a framework for console services (Youtube). It’s a way and tooling that makes it easier to provide access to shell and console oriented services over the web, using curl.

Me again. Governance, money in the curl project and someone offering commercial support (Youtube) was a presentation about how we intend for the project to join a legal entity SFC, and a little about money we have, what to spend it on and how I feel it is good to keep the project separate from any commercial support ventures any of us might do!

While the list above might seems like more than enough, the day wasn’t over. Christian Schmitz also did his presentation on Using SSL root certificate from Mac/Windows.

Our local hero organizer James Fuller then spoiled us completely when we got around to have dinner at a monastery with beer brewing monks and excellent food. Good food, good company and curl related dinner subjects. That’s almost heaven defined!

Sunday

Daylight saving time morning and you could tell. I’m sure it was not at all related to the beers from the night before…

James Fuller fired off the day by talking to us about Curlpipe (github), a DSL for building http execution pipelines.

The class room we used for the curl up presentations and discussions during Saturday and Sunday.

Robin Marx then put in the next gear and entertained us another hour with a protocol deep dive titled HTTP/3 (QUIC): the details (slides). For me personally this was a exactly what I needed as Robin clearly has kept up with more details and specifics in the QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols specifications than I’ve managed and his talk help the rest of the room get at least little bit more in sync with current development.

Jakub Nesetril and Lukáš Linhart from Apiary then talked us through what they’re doing and thinking around web based APIs and how they and their customers use curl: Real World curl usage at Apiary.

Then I was up again and I got to explain to my fellow curl hackers about HTTP/3 in curl. Internal architecture, 3rd party libs and APIs.

Jakub Klímek explained to us in very clear terms about current and existing problems in his talk IRIs and IDNs: Problems of non-ASCII countries. Some of the problems involve curl and while most of them have their clear explanations, I think we have to lessons to learn from this: URLs are still as messy and undocumented as ever before and that we might have some issues to fix in this area in curl.

To bring my fellow up to speed on the details of the new API introduced the last year I then made a presentation called The new URL API.

Clearly overdoing it for a single weekend, I then got the honors of doing the last presentation of curl up 2019 and for an audience that were about to die from exhaustion I talked Internals. A walk-through of the architecture and what libcurl does when doing a transfer.

Summary

I ended up doing seven presentations during this single weekend. Not all of them stellar or delivered with elegance but I hope they were still valuable to some. I did not steal someone else’s time slot as I would gladly have given up time if we had other speakers wanted to say something. Let’s aim for more non-Daniel talkers next time!

A weekend like this is such a boost for inspiration, for morale and for my ego. All the friendly faces with the encouraging and appreciating comments will keep me going for a long time after this.

Thank you to our awesome and lovely event sponsors – shown in the curl up logo below! Without you, this sort of happening would not happen.

curl up 2020

I will of course want to see another curl up next year. There are no plans yet and we don’t know where to host. I think it is valuable to move it around but I think it is even more valuable that we have a friend on the ground in that particular city to help us out. Once this year’s event has sunken in properly and a month or two has passed, the case for and organization of next year’s conference will commence. Stay tuned, and if you want to help hosting us do let me know!


The future of HTTP Symposium

This year’s version of curl up started a little differently: With an afternoon of HTTP presentations. The event took place the same week the IETF meeting has just ended here in Prague so we got the opportunity to invite people who possibly otherwise wouldn’t have been here… Of course this was only possible thanks to our awesome sponsors, visible in the image above!

Lukáš Linhart from Apiary started out with “Web APIs: The Past, The Present and The Future”. A journey trough XML-RPC, SOAP and more. One final conclusion might be that we’re not quite done yet…

James Fuller from MarkLogic talked about “The Defenestration of Hypermedia in HTTP”. How HTTP web technologies have changed over time while the HTTP paradigms have survived since a very long time.

I talked about DNS-over-HTTPS. A presentation similar to the one I did before at FOSDEM, but in a shorter time so I had to talk a little faster!

Mike Bishop from Akamai (editor of the HTTP/3 spec and a long time participant in the HTTPbis work) talked about “The evolution of HTTP (from HTTP/1 to HTTP/3)” from HTTP/0.9 to HTTP/3 and beyond.

Robin Marx then rounded off the series of presentations with his tongue in cheek “HTTP/3 (QUIC): too big to fail?!” where we provided a long list of challenges for QUIC and HTTP/3 to get deployed and become successful.

We ended this afternoon session with a casual Q&A session with all the presenters discussing various aspects of HTTP, the web, REST, APIs and the benefits and deployment challenges of QUIC.

I think most of us learned things this afternoon and we could leave the very elegant Charles University room enriched and with more food for thoughts about these technologies.

We ended the evening with snacks and drinks kindly provided by Apiary.

(This event was not streamed and not recorded on video, you had to be there in person to enjoy it.)