This is the video recording of my talk with this title, done at February 4, 2024 10:00 in the K1.105 room at FOSDEM 2024. The room can hold some 800 people but there were a few hundred seats still unoccupied. Several people I met up with later have insisted that 10 am on a Sunday is way too early for attending talks…
When I was about to start my talk, the slides would not show on the projector. Yeah, sigh. Nothing surprising maybe, but you always hope you can avoid these problems – in particular in the last moment with a huge audience waiting.
There was this separate video monitor laptop that clearly showed that my laptop would output the correct thing – in a proper resolution (1280 x 720 as per auto-negotiation), but the projector refused to play ball. The live stream could also see my output, so the problem was somehow from the video box to the projector.
Several people eventually got involved, things were rebooted multiple times, cables were yanked and replugged in again. First after I installed arandr and forced-updated the resolution of my HDMI output to 1920×1080 the projector would suddenly show my presentation. (Later on I was told that people had the same problem in this room the day before…)
That was about nine minutes of technical difficulties that is cut out from the recording. Nine minutes to test my nerves and presentation finesse as I had to adapt.
I attended FOSDEM for the first time back in 2010. I have since been back and attended every single physical version of the conference since then (remember that it skipped a few years in the COVID days).
FOSDEM is my favorite conference no doubt.
I did a presentation in the embedded dev room in 2010. I have in fact talked in front of audiences almost every year and some years I did it more than once.
Stickers and coasters
If you are interested in getting a curl sticker or two, this is a great opportunity. I will bring a senseless amount of curl stickers in different flavors and sizes so that hopefully everyone who wants one can get one. Find me at FOSDEM to get one. Or find the wolfSSL stand (K building level 1), where I will stock up stickers and also spend time every once in a while.
You can find me at the wolfSSL booth following my talks. Saturday 11:30 – 13:00 and Sunday 11:00 – 13:00.
I will also bring fancy PCB-style coasters. You must have a commit merged in curl’s source repository to be eligible to one of those beauties receive from me.
Feel free to email or DM me on Mastodon or something for syncing.
The talk is set to take 20 minutes (including questions). My presentation abstract from when I still naively thought I could get 40 minutes describes the talk like this:
Everyone uses curl, the Swiss army knife of Internet transfers. Earlier this year we celebrated curl’s 25th birthday, and while this tool has provided a solid set of command line options for decades, new ones are added over time This talk is a look at some of the most powerful and interesting additions to curl done in recent years. The perhaps lesser known curl tricks that might enrich your command lines, extend your “tool belt” and make you more productive. Also trurl, the recently created companion tool for URL manipulations you maybe did not realize you want.
I will have to make some tough decisions on what of all this that I can actually include…
You too could have made curl
This talk has been accepted on the main track, but is not yet scheduled.
Daniel has taken the curl project to run in some 20 billion installations. He talks about what it takes to succeed with Open Source: patience, time, ups and downs, cooperation, fighting your impostor syndrome – all while having fun. There’s no genius or magic trick behind successful open source. You can do it. The talk will of course be spiced up with anecdotes, experiences and stories from Daniel’s 25 years of leading the curl project.
More
I proposed a talk titled “HTTP/3 – why and where are we” in the Web Performance devroom but it was not accepted.
I will update this post with more info as such becomes available.
curl is actually something which is critical, especially to our data management system. It is being used very widely across NASA.
Dr Steve Crawford
2020
Back in 2020 I started getting emails from NASA asking for details and specifics about curl’s origins and in particular about where contributors to the project works, and I first replied eagerly trying to be helpful, but over time I kept receiving very similar emails from other NASA departments.
2021
It puzzled me, and out of frustration I posted this tweet in April 2021. A tweet that received a lot of attention and more than 3,000 likes.
2023
In a closing keynote at the FOSDEM 2023 conference, Dr. Steve Crawford did a talk titled NASA and Open Source Software (video, slides).
Some 24 minutes in, on slide 28, Dr Crawford shows a screenshot of the above tweet and talks about NASA’s use of curl, and says that piece I quoted at the top.
I was at the FOSDEM 2023 conference, but unfortunately I had to skip the last hour of presentations so I had just left the campus when this talk was held.
It would have been a blast to have been present in the room at that time. Now I instead got an avalanche of messages from friends and acquaintances who notified me about this talk and mention of me, which was of course also fun.
Takeaway
I’m glad NASA is aware of some of their problems and that they listen. It is a comfort that my text was taken with the right attitude. It also feels good that I used the correct tone in that Tweet: I figure it is rarely someone’s actual desire to appear clumsy or bureaucratic, but organizations and companies can easily get trapped in processes that still make them act that way.
Credit
As a celebration of NASA, the top image is taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and features the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light years away.
Lots of people walked around the conference this year with sarcastic or otherwise amusing messages scrolling or blinking on them.
GitHub Social
When a few people at the GitHub Social event on the Saturday evening showed up wearing those badges, this triggered Martin Woodward (VP of DevRel for GitHub) who hosted the event, and he brought out his e-ink programmable badge from GitHub Universe and with a big smile on his face he showed off how cool it was and some of the functionality it holds. Combined with the story behind how he made this happen. Good stuff!
The red led badge immediately felt boring in comparison and in particular my friend Linus expressed his desire to get one. Martin explained how they had a few of them as prizes for the lottery of the evening. You would get one chance to win for every “hash collision” you could find – we all had gotten a hash code each on a sticker when we entered the place. Linus took off and searched for collisions with a frenzy, trying to maximize his chances.
Hash collisions
My fancy t-shirt front of the evening, showing my hash in the top left.
It was a fun and sufficiently nerdy social game that made us talk and mingle around a bit among the other fellow open source maintainers in the room and soon enough we found occasional collisions. I think I ended up finding three, Linus found six. Every time we wrote our names on a piece of paper and put it in a big container.
Socializing, beers, pizza and then eventually the time had come. No more collisions, time to see who had won.
Prizes
GitHub handed out many different prizes apart from the badges: GitHub pro subscriptions, hats and a huge GitHub Led logo.
I got the honors of picking the first five prizes: the pro subscriptions. Out of the five folded papers one of them had my name on it! Me already being a GitHub star (which offers that, and Martin knowing this), my name was instead replaced by another ticket. Still, I had apparently managed to pull my own name out of the hundreds of lottery tickets!
The badges
When the time come to pick the winners for the five badges, someone else fished up five tickets from the box and they were handed over to Martin to who read them, one by one.
Daniel Stenberg – I had won again! What are the odds? It was most hilarious, but then Martin continued, he read another name and then when he unfolded a ticket he looked a little surprised and said a little wondering another Stenberg? Yes, my brother Björn who was also present there then also won of those fun badges. What were the odds of that?!
Linus did not win one.
Linus, Björn and me are friends since over thirty years back (we are haxx.se) and since now two of us had won badges and the person who wanted it the most did not win, we of course could not resist to tease and taunt Linus plenty about it. What are friends for after all?
Leveling up
I knew how much Linus wanted one of these, so while I considered giving him mine, I first did a careful check with Martin. Did he possibly have an extra spare one that I could perhaps get my hands on for Linus?
He probably did. Over at his hotel he might have an extra. He even very graciously offered me that one like the champ he is.
Knowing that this possibility was in the pipeline, we could level up the taunting even more and really rub it in on Linus. Me and Björn thought it was mightily fun. You can probably say we were badgering him.
A midnight image
The GitHub event ended, we all walked out into the Brussels night, aiming to get some sleep to endure another intense FOSDEM full day the following Sunday. At 00:55 Martin messaged me this picture:
Sunday morning
Of course we reminded Linus already at breakfast how some of us actually have these cool badges and then maybe a few more times the following hours. We also shared the secret with other friends so the surrounding had a better understanding of what was going on.
In the meantime, I secretly coordinated a badge drop-off. My personal hero Martin delivered a box for Linus with this badge, I could pick it up and while pausing our badge-teasing, I could hand over the cardboard box to him with his GitHub handle on a sticker.
Here’s one for you
That expression. It took a few seconds for what just happened to sink in, before Linus realized exactly what had been going on since last night.
Priceless.
An e-ink programmable badge
The badge tech itself is a 296 x 128 pixels e-ink display powered by an FP2040 (Raspberry Pi) Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz. Easily programmable too.
If you want one, pimoroni sells these beauties. (I have no relation with them.)
They call this the badger 2040, which is particularly fun since I use the nickname bagder since a long time, on GitHub and elsewhere. A badger badge for bagder.
FOSDEM 2020 is over for this time and I had an awesome time in Brussels once again.
Stickers
I brought a huge collection of stickers this year and I kept going back to the wolfSSL stand to refill the stash and it kept being emptied almost as fast. Hundreds of curl stickers were given away! The photo on the right shows my “sticker bag” as it looked before I left Sweden.
Lesson for next year: bring a larger amount of stickers! If you missed out on curl stickers, get in touch and I’ll do my best to satisfy your needs.
The talk
“HTTP/3 for everyone” was my single talk this FOSDEM. Just two days before the talk, I landed updated commits in curl’s git master branch for doing HTTP/3 up-to-date with the latest draft (-25). Very timely and I got to update the slide mentioning this.
As I talked HTTP/3 already last year in the Mozilla devroom, I also made sure to go through the slides I used then to compare and make sure I wouldn’t do too much of the same talk. But lots of things have changed and most of the content is updated and different this time around. Last year, literally hundreds of people were lining up outside wanting to get into room when the doors were closed. This year, I talked in the room Janson, which features 1415 seats. The biggest one on campus. It was pack full!
It is kind of an adrenaline rush to stand in front of such a wall of people. At one time in my talk I paused for a brief moment and then I felt I could almost hear the complete silence when a huge amount of attentive faces captured what I had to say.
I got a lot of positive feedback on the presentation. I also thought that my decision to not even try to take question in the big room was a correct and I ended up talking and discussing details behind the scene for a good while after my talk was done. Really fun!
The video
The video is also available from the FOSDEM site in webm and mp4 formats.
The slides
If you want the slides only, run over to slideshare and view them.
I’m going to FOSDEM again in 2020, this will be my 11th consecutive year I’m travling to this awesome conference in Brussels, Belgium.
At this my 11th FOSDEM visit I will also deliver my 11th FOSDEM talk: “HTTP/3 for everyone“. It will happen at 16:00 Saturday the 1st of February 2020, in Janson, the largest room on the campus. (My third talk in the main track.)
For those who have seen me talk about HTTP/3 before, this talk will certainly have overlaps but I’m also always refreshing and improving slides and I update them as the process moves on, things changes and I get feedback. I spoke about HTTP/3 already at FODEM 2019 in the Mozilla devroom (at which time there was a looong line of people who tried, but couldn’t get a seat in the room) – but I think you’ll find that there’s enough changes and improvements in this talk to keep you entertained this year as well!
If you come to FOSDEM, don’t hesitate to come say hi and grab a curl sticker or two – I intend to bring and distribute plenty – and talk curl, HTTP and Internet transfers with me!
You will most likely find me at my talk, in the cafeteria area or at the wolfSSL stall. (DM me on twitter to pin me down! @bagder)
I view myself as primarily a software developer. Perhaps secondary as someone who’s somewhat knowledgeable in networking and is participating in protocol development and discussions. I do not regularly proclaim myself to be a “speaker” or someone who’s even very good at talking in front of people.
Time to wake up and face reality? I’m slowly starting to realize that I’m actually doing more presentations than ever before in my life and I’m enjoying it.
Since October 2015 I’ve done 53 talks and presentations in front of audiences – in ten countries. That’s one presentation done every 25 days on average. (The start date of this count is a little random but it just happens that I started to keep a proper log then.) I’ve talked to huge audiences and to small. I done presentations that were appreciated and I’ve done some that were less successful.
The room for the JAX keynote, May 2019, as seen from the stage, some 20 minutes before 700 persons sat down in the audience to hear my talk on HTTP/3.
My increased frequency in speaking engagements coincides with me starting to work full-time from home back in 2014. Going to places to speak is one way to get out of the house and see the “real world” a little bit and see what the real people are doing. And a chance to hang out with humans for a change. Besides, I only ever talk on topics that are dear to me and that I know intimately well so I rarely feel pressure when delivering them. 2014 – 2015 was also the time frame when HTTP/2 was being finalized and the general curiosity on that new protocol version helped me find opportunities back then.
Public speaking is like most other things: surprisingly enough, practice actually makes you better at it! I still have a lot to learn and improve, but speaking many times has for example made me better at figuring out roughly how long time I need to deliver a particular talk. It has taught me to “find myself” better when presenting and be more relaxed and the real me – no need to put up a facade of some kind or pretend. People like seeing that there’s a real person there.
I talked HTTP/2 at Techday by Init, in November 2016.
I’m not even getting that terribly nervous before my talks anymore. I used to really get a raised pulse for the first 45 talks or so, but by doing it over and over and over I think the practice has made me more secure and more relaxed in my attitude to the audience and the topics. I think it has made me a slightly better presenter and it certainly makes me enjoy it more.
I’m not “a good presenter”. I can deliver a talk and I can do it with dignity and I think the audience is satisfied with me in most cases, but by watching actual good presenters talk I realize that I still have a long journey ahead of me. Of course, parts of the explanation is that, to connect with the beginning of this post, I’m a developer. I don’t talk for a living and I actually very rarely practice my presentations very much because I don’t feel I can spend that time.
The JAX keynote in May 2019 as seen from the audience. Photo by Bernd Ruecker.
Some of the things that are still difficult include:
The money issue. I actually am a developer and that’s what I do for a living. Taking time off the development to prepare a presentation, travel to a distant place, sacrifice my spare time for one or more days and communicating something interesting to an audience that demands and expects it to be both good and reasonably entertaining takes time away from that development. Getting travel and accommodation compensated is awesome but unfortunately not enough. I need to insist on getting paid for this. I frequently turn down speaking opportunities when they can’t pay me for my time.
Saying no. Oh my god do I have a hard time to do this. This year, I’ve been invited to so many different conferences and the invitations keep flying in. For every single received invitation, I get this warm and comfy feeling and I feel honored and humbled by the fact that someone actually wants me to come to their conference or gathering to talk. There’s the calendar problem: I can’t be in two places at once. Then I also can’t plan events too close to each other in time to avoid them holding up “real work” too much or to become too much of a nuisance to my family. Sometimes there’s also the financial dilemma: if I can’t get compensation, it gets tricky for me to do it, no matter how good the conference seems to be and the noble cause they’re working for.
Feedback. To determine what parts of the presentation that should be improved for the next time I speak of the same or similar topic, which parts should be removed and if something should be expanded, figuring what works and what doesn’t work is vital. For most talks I’ve done, there’s been no formal way to provide or receive this feedback, and for the small percentage that had a formal feedback form or a scoring system or similar, taking care of a bunch of distributed grades (for example “your talk was graded 4.2 on a scale between 1 and 5”) and random comments – either positive or negative – is really hard… I get the best feedback from close friends who dare to tell me the truth as it is.
Conforming to silly formats. Slightly different, but some places want me to send me my slides in, either a long time before the event (I’ve had people ask me to provide way over a week(!) before), or they dictate that the slides should be sent to them using Microsoft Powerpoint, PDF or some other silly format. I want to use my own preferred tools when designing presentations as I need to be able to reuse the material for more and future presentations. Sure, I can convert to other formats but that usually ruins formatting and design. Then a lot the time and sweat I put into making a fine and good-looking presentation is more or less discarded! Fortunately, most places let me plug in my laptop and everything is fine!
Upcoming talks?
As a little service to potential audience members and conference organizers, I’m listing all my upcoming speaking engagements on a dedicated page on my web site:
I try to keep that page updated to reflect current reality. It also shows that some organizers are forward-planning waaaay in advance…
Here’s me talking about DNS-over-HTTPS at FOSDEM 2019. Photo by Steve Holme.
Invite someone like me to talk?
Here’s some advice on how to invite a speaker (like me) with style:
Ask well in advance (more than 2-3 months preferably, probably not more than 9). When I agree to a talk, others who ask for talks in close proximity to that date will get declined. I get a surprisingly large amount of invitations for events just a month into the future or so, and it rarely works for me to get those into my calendar in that time frame.
Do not assume for-free delivery. I think it is good tone of you to address the price/charge situation, if not in the first contact email at least in the following discussion. If you cannot pay, that’s also useful information to provide early.
If the time or duration of the talk you’d like is “unusual” (ie not 30-60 minutes) do spell that out early on.
Surprisingly often I get invited to talk without a specified topic or title. The inviter then expects me to present that. Since you contact me you clearly had some kind of vision of what a talk by me would entail, it would make my life easier if that vision was conveyed as it could certainly help me produce a talk subject that will work!
Presenting HTTP/2 at the Velocity conference in New York, October 2015, together with Ragnar Lönn.
What I bring
To every presentation I do, I bring my laptop. It has HDMI and USB-C ports. I also carry a HDMI-to-VGA adapter for the few installations that still use the old “projector port”. Places that need something else than those ports tend to have their own converters already since they’re then used with equipment not being fitted for their requirements.
I always bring my own clicker (the “remote” with which I can advance to next slide). I never use the laser-pointer feature, but I like being able to move around on the stage and not have to stand close to the keyboard when I present.
Presentations
I never create my presentations with video or sound in them, and I don’t do presentations that need Internet access. All this to simplify and to reduce the risk of problems.
I work hard on limiting the amount of text on each slide, but I also acknowledge that if a slide set should have value after-the-fact there needs to be a certain amount. I’m a fan of revealing the text or graphics step-by-step on the slides to avoid having half the audience reading ahead on the slide and not listening.
I’ve settled on 16:9 ratio for all presentations. Luckily, the remaining 4:3 projectors are now scarce.
I always make and bring a backup of my presentations in PDF format so that basically “any” computer could display that in case of emergency. Like if my laptop dies. As mentioned above, PDF is not an ideal format, but as a backup it works.
I talked “web transport” in the Mozilla devroom at FOSDEM, February 2017 in front of this audience. Not a single empty seat…
I didn’t present anything during last year’s conference, so I submitted my DNS-over-HTTPS presentation proposal early on for this year’s FOSDEM. Someone suggested it was generic enough I should rather ask for main track instead of the DNS room, and so I did. Then time passed and in November 2018 “HTTP/3” was officially coined as a real term and then, after the Mozilla devroom’s deadline had been extended for a week I filed my second proposal. I might possibly even have been an hour or two after the deadline. I hoped at least one of them would be accepted.
Not only were both my proposed talks accepted, I was also approached and couldn’t decline the honor of participating in the DNS privacy panel. Ok, three slots in the same FOSDEM is a new record for me, but hey, surely that’s no problems for a grown-up..
HTTP/3
I of coursed hoped there would be interest in what I had to say.
I spent the time immediately before my talk with a coffee in the awesome newly opened cafeteria part to have a moment of calmness before I started. I then headed over to the U2.208 room maybe half an hour before the start time.
It was packed. Quite literally there were hundreds of persons waiting in the area outside the U2 rooms and there was this totally massive line of waiting visitors queuing to get into the Mozilla room once it would open.
The “Sorry, this room is FULL” sign is commonly seen on FOSDEM.
People don’t know who I am by my appearance so I certainly didn’t get any special treatment, waiting for my talk to start. I waited in line with the rest and when the time for my presentation started to get closer I just had to excuse myself, leave my friends behind and push through the crowd. I managed to get a “sorry, it’s full” told to me by a conference admin before one of the room organizers recognized me as the speaker of the next talk and I could walk by a very long line of humans that eventually would end up not being able to get in. The room could fit 170 souls, and every single seat was occupied when I started my presentation just a few minutes late.
This presentation could have filled a much larger room. Two years ago my HTTP/2 talk filled up the 300 seat room Mozilla had that year.
I tend to need a little “landing time” after having done a presentation to cool off an come back to normal senses and adrenaline levels again. I got myself a lunch, a beer and chatted with friends in the cafeteria (again). During this conversation, it struck me I had forgotten something in my coming presentation and I added a slide that I felt would improve it (the screenshot showing “about:networking#dns” output with DoH enabled). In what felt like no time, it was again to move. I walked over to Janson, the giant hall that fits 1,470 persons, which I entered a few minutes ahead of my scheduled time and began setting up my machine.
I started off with a little technical glitch because the projector was correctly detected and setup as a second screen on my laptop but it would detect and use a too high resolution for it, but after just a short moment of panic I lowered the resolution on that screen manually and the image appeared fine. Phew! With a slightly raised pulse, I witnessed the room fill up. Almost full. I estimate over 90% of the seats were occupied.
The DNS over HTTPS talk seen from far back. Photo by Steve Holme.
This was a brand new talk with all new material and I performed it for the largest audience I think I’ve ever talked in front of.
Video
Video of my DNS over HTTPS presentation. Duration 50 minutes.
To no surprise, my talk triggered questions and objections. I spent a while in the corridor behind Janson afterward, discussing DoH details, the future of secure DNS and other subtle points of the different protocols involved. In the end I think I manged pretty good, and I had expected more arguments and more tough questions. This is after all the single topic I’ve had more abuse and name-calling for than anything else I’ve ever worked on before in my 20+ years in Internet protocols. (After all, I now often refer to myself and what I do as webshit.)
I never really intended to involve myself in DNS privacy discussions, but due to the constant misunderstandings and mischaracterizations (both on purpose and by ignorance) sometimes spread about DoH, I’ve felt a need to stand up for it a few times. I think that was a contributing factor to me getting invited to be part of the DNS privacy panel that the organizers of the DNS devroom setup.
There are several problems and challenges left to solve before we’re in a world with correctly and mostly secure DNS. DoH is one attempt to raise the bar. I was content to had the opportunity to really spell out my view of things before the DNS privacy panel.
While sitting next to these giants from the DNS world, Stéphane Bortzmeyer, Bert Hubert and me discussed DoT, DoH, DNS centralization, user choice, quad-dns-hosters and more. The discussion didn’t get very heated but instead I think it showed that we’re all largely in agreement that we need more secure DNS and that there are obstacles in the way forward that we need to work further on to overcome. Moderator Jan-Piet Mens did an excellent job I think, handing over the word, juggling the questions and taking in questions from the audience.
Video
Video from the DNS Privacy panel. Duration 30 minutes.
Ten years, ten slots
Appearing in three scheduled slots during the same FOSDEM was a bit much, and it effectively made me not attend many other talks. They were all great fun to do though, and I appreciate people giving me the chance to share my knowledge and views to the world. As usually very nicely organized and handled. The videos of each presentation are linked to above.
I met many people, old and new friends. I handed out a lot of curl stickers and I enjoyed talking to people about my recently announced new job at wolfSSL.
After ten consecutive annual visits to FOSDEM, I have appeared in ten program slots!
I fully intend to go back to FOSDEM again next year. For all the friends, the waffles, the chats, the beers, the presentations and then for the waffles again. Maybe I will even present something…
I’ll be celebrating my 10th FOSDEM when I travel down to Brussels again in early February 2019. That’s ten years in a row. It’ll also be the 6th year I present something there, as I’ve done these seven talks in the past:
DNS over HTTPS (aka “DoH”, RFC 8484) introduces a new transport protocol to do secure and private DNS messaging. Why was it made, how does it work and how users are free (to resolve names).
The presentation will discuss reasons why DoH was deemed necessary and interesting to ship and deploy and how it compares to alternative technologies that offer similar properties. It will discuss how this protocol “liberates” users and offers stronger privacy (than the typical status quo).
How to enable and start using DoH today.
It will also discuss some downsides with DoH and what you should consider before you decide to use a random DoH server on the Internet.
This time TCP is replaced by the new transport protocol QUIC and things are different yet again! This is a presentation about HTTP/3 and QUIC with a following Q&A about everything HTTP. Join us at Goto 10.
HTTP/3 is the designated name for the coming next version of the protocol that is currently under development within the QUIC working group in the IETF.
HTTP/3 is designed to improve in areas where HTTP/2 still has some shortcomings, primarily by changing the transport layer. HTTP/3 is the first major protocol to step away from TCP and instead it uses QUIC. I’ll talk about HTTP/3 and QUIC. Why the new protocols are deemed necessary, how they work, how they change how things are sent over the network and what some of the coming deployment challenges will be.
This isn’t strictly a prepared talk or presentation but I’ll still be there and participate in the panel discussion on DNS privacy. I hope to get most of my finer points expressed in the DoH talk mentioned above, but I’m fully prepared to elaborate on some of them in this session.
I attended FOSDEM again in 2017 and it was as intense, chaotic and wonderful as ever. I met old friends, got new friends and I got to test a whole range of Belgian beers. Oh, and there was also a set of great open source related talks to enjoy!
On Saturday at 2pm I delivered my talk on curl in the main track in the almost frighteningly large room Janson. I estimate that it was almost half full, which would mean upwards 700 people in the audience. The talk itself went well. I got audible responses from the audience several times and I kept well within my given time with time over for questions. The trickiest problem was the audio from the people who asked questions because it wasn’t at all very easy to hear, while the audio is great for the audience and in the video recording. Slightly annoying because as everyone else heard, it made me appear half deaf. Oh well. I got great questions both then and from people approaching me after the talk. The questions and the feedback I get from a talk is really one of the things that makes me appreciate talking the most.
So after I had spent some time discussing curl things and handing out many stickers after my talk, I managed to land in the cafeteria for a while until it was time for me to once again go and perform.
We’re usually a team of friends that hang out during FOSDEM and we all went over to the Mozilla room to be there perhaps 20 minutes before my talk was scheduled and wow, there was a huge crowd outside of that room already waiting by the time we arrived. When the doors then finally opened (about 10 minutes before my talk started), I had to zigzag my way through to get in, and there was a large amount of people who didn’t get in. None of my friends from the cafeteria made it in!
The Mozilla devroom had 363 seats, not a single one was unoccupied and there was people standing along the sides and the back wall. So, an estimated nearly 400 persons in that room saw me speak about HTTP/2 deployments numbers right now, how HTTP/2 doesn’t really work well under 2% packet loss situations and then a bit about how QUIC can solve some of that and what QUIC is and when we might see the first experiments coming with IETF-QUIC – which really isn’t the same as Google-QUIC was.
To be honest, it is hard to deliver a talk in twenty minutes and I was only 30 seconds over my time. I got questions and after the talk I spent a long time talking with people about HTTP, HTTP/2, QUIC, curl and the future of Internet protocols and transports. Very interesting.
I’m not sure if I was just unusually unlucky in my choices, or if there really was more people this year, but I experienced that “FULL” sign more than usual this year.
I fully intend to return again next year. Who knows, maybe I’ll figure out something to talk about then too. See you there?
