Tag Archives: survey

cURL and libcurl

curl survey 2018 analysis

This year, 670 individuals spent some of their valuable time on our survey and filled in answers that help us guide what to do next. What’s good, what’s bad, what to remove and where to emphasize efforts more.

It’s taken me a good while to write up this analysis but hopefully the results here can be used all through the year as a reminder what people actually think and how they use curl and libcurl.

A new question this yeas was in which continent the respondent lives, which ended up with an unexpectedly strong Euro focus:

What didn’t trigger any surprises though was the question of what protocols users are using, which basically identically mirrored previous years’ surveys. HTTP and HTTPS are the king duo by far.

Read the full 34 page analysis PDF.

Some other interesting take-aways:

  • One person claims to use curl to handle 19 protocols! (out of 23)
  • One person claims to use curl on 11 different platforms!
  • Over 5% of the users argue for a rewrite in rust.
  • Windows is now the second most common platform to use curl on.
cURL and libcurl

curl user survey 2018

The curl user survey 2018 is up. If you ever use curl or libcurl, please donate some of your precious time and provide your answers!

The curl user survey is an annual tradition since 2014 and it is one of our primary ways to get direct feedback from a larger audience about what’s good, what’s bad and what to focus on next in the curl project. Your input really helps us!

2018 survey

The survey will be up and available to fill in during 14 days, from May 15th until the end of May 28th. Please help us share this and ask your curl using friends to join in as well.

If you submitted data last year, make sure you didn’t miss the analysis of the 2017 survey.

cURL and libcurl

curl survey 2017 – analysis

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The results are in. The curl user survey 2017 was up for a little over two weeks and attracted answers from a total of 513 individuals. This was a much better turnout that last year’s disappointment – thank you everyone!

The 2017 survey analysis as a 40 page PDF

This year we learned that the distribution curve for the amount of protocols people use curl for looks like this:

And the interest in getting even more protocols supported is still high, if not even very high and I think the top-most requested protocol is a bit surprising:

The outcome of the survey is the analysis document in which I’ve summarized by thoughts and added a bunch of graphs and other diagrams that illustrate the numbers. In particular compared to previous’ years results. It became a 40 page thing as I’ve tried to be detailed and also somewhat elaborate on commenting and reacting to a lot of the write-in suggestions and comments!

If you want to draw your own conclusions or just verify mine, I also offer you the following source material:

  1. The pristine 2017 CSV file as downloaded from Google, with all the results from the survey.
  2. To compare with last year, I also offer you the 2016 CSV file.
  3. During my the work of producing the analysis document, I imported the 2017 CSV file into libreoffice and fiddled with a lot of numbers and graphs, most of that didn’t end up in the document but you can find the raw 2017 survey libreoffice calc file and verify the outcomes or the formulas used.
cURL and libcurl

The curl user survey 2017

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The annual survey for curl and libcurl users is open. The 2017 edition has some minor edits since last year but is mostly the same set of questions used before. To help us detect changes and trends over time.

If you use curl or libcurl, in any way, shape or form, please consider spending a few minutes of your precious time on this. Your input helps us understand where we are and in which direction we should go next.

Fill in the form!

The poll is open fourteen days from Friday May 12th until midnight (CEST) May 27th 2017. All data we collect is non-personal and anonymous.

To get some idea of what sort of information we extract and collect from the results, have a look at the analysis of last year’s survey.

The subsequent analysis of the 2017 user survey.

cURL and libcurl

curl user survey results 2016

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The annual curl user poll was up 11 days from May 16 to and including May 27th, and it has taken me a while to summarize and put together everything into a single 21 page document with all the numbers and plenty of graphs.

Full 2016 survey analysis document

The conclusion I’ve drawn from it: “We’re not done yet”.

Here’s a bonus graph from the report, showing what TLS backends people are using with curl in 2016 and 2015:

curl-tlsbackends2-2016

cURL and libcurl, Development

curl user poll 2016

It is time for our annual survey on how you use curl and libcurl. Your chance to tell us how you think we’ve done and what we should do next. The survey will close on midnight (central European time) May 27th, 2016.

If you use curl or libcurl from time to time, please consider helping us out with providing your feedback and opinions on a few things:

http://goo.gl/forms/e4CoSDEKde

It’ll take you a couple of minutes and it’ll help us a lot when making decisions going forward. Thanks a lot!

The poll is hosted by Google and that short link above will take you to:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JftlLZoOZLHRZ_UqigzUDD0AKrTBZqPMpnyOdF2UDic/viewform

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!

cURL and libcurl

2015 curl user poll analysis

My full 30 page document with all details and analyses of the curl user poll 2015 is now available. It shows details of all the questions, most of them with a comparison with last year’s survey. The write-ins are also full of good advice, wisdom and some signs of ignorance or unawareness.

I hope all curl hackers and others generally interested in the project can use my “report” to learn something about our users and our user’s view of the project and our products.

Let’s use this to guide us going forward.

keep-calm-and-improve-curl

cURL and libcurl

curl user poll 2015

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Update: the poll is now closed. The responses can be found here.

Now is the time. If you use curl or libcurl from time to time, please consider helping us out with providing your feedback and opinions on a few things:

https://goo.gl/FyToBn

It’ll take you a couple of minutes and it’ll help us a lot when making decisions going forward.

The poll is hosted by Google and that short link above will take you to:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uQNYfTmRwF9RX5-oq_HV4VyeT1j7cxXpuBIp8uy5nqQ/viewform

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

The curl and libcurl 2014 survey

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Reading through the answers to the curl project‘s survey “curl and libcurl 2014” is very interesting and educational.

After having lead and participated in this project for so long I have my own picture of what we’re good and bad at. That’s not exactly the same image I get when I read the survey responses. That’s of course the educating part and I really want to learn from this poll and see where to put in some efforts and attempt to improve. At the same time I’ve been working for a while to put together a roadmap for the project, and the survey will help guide us with that work as well.

The full generated summary of the answers can be found on the site, but I thought I do the extra effort here and try to extrapolate data, compare and try to get to the real story that lurks in the shadows.

Over the almost 10 days the poll was open, we received 194 responses. I was hoping for more participation, but on the other hand I don’t think more people would’ve given a much different view. My only concern would be that I’m not sure exactly how well we reached out.

Almost all curl users use it for HTTP and HTTPS. Sure, we also use a lot of other protocols and in fact all supported protocols did up having at least two users according to the survey, but only a single digit percentage did not mark HTTP and HTTPS as protocols they use. The least used supported protocol gopher, is used among 1.5% of the users who responded.

FTPS and SFTP are basically equally much used and they are the 4th and 5th most used protocols. HTTP, HTTPS and FTP are clearly our most popular protocols.

Only one in five users use curl on a single platform. All others use it on two or more, and one if four use it on four or more with an unexpectedly high 11% saying they use it on 5 or more platforms! That’s a pretty strong message to me that our multi-platform strategy is important.

Our users have been with us for a long time. Half of the users have been using curl for five years or more! A fifth has been with us for 8 years or more! And yet there seems to be a healthy amount of newcomers finding us as 14% is within their first year.

The above numbers combined, I’m not surprised but only happy to see that 4 out of 5 users are also involved in other open source projects. curl is just one piece in a large ecosystem and I think it is good that we all participate in several projects so that we learn and cross-pollinate where possible!

Less than half of the respondents are subscribed to a curl mailing list, and curl-library is the most popular one. This also reflects in subscriber numbers on the actual mailing lists where curl-library with its 1400+ members has almost twice as many subscribers as curl-users. One way to view this is that we are old enough, established enough and working enough so that users don’t have to subscribe to our lists to keep up. The less optimistic way to see it could be that this is because we haven’t reached out good enough or that our mailing list culture/setup isn’t welcoming enough.

Perhaps most surprising to me: that several persons got upset and reacted strongly to the question about how good we treat “female and other minorities” in the project. To me there’s no doubt that female contributors are a minority in the curl community and I want to learn if we’re doing our best to be inclusive and open to all possible contributors. Or at least how good/bad people think we are doing.

29% of the respondents have contributed patches, meaning 56 individuals. I think that tells more about the ones who took part of the survey than it measures participation level among “regular users”.

Documentation

A big revelation for me was the question where I asked people to identify the “worst parts” of the project. The image here below is the look of the summary.

It quite clearly identifies “documentation” as the area in most need of improvements.

I don’t think the amount of docs is the problem. After discussing with people I think the primary issues are:

  • Some collections of docs are just too big and hard to find in, like the curl man page and the curl_easy_setopt man pages. We need to split them up and/or rearrange somehow to help people find the info they need. Work has started on this. I’ll follow up with details later.
  • We get slightly bad “reviews” on this when people confuse the libcurl bindings’ lack of docs to be our problem. Lots of libcurl bindings are not very good documented – but they are separate projects not controlled or documented by us. I don’t know what we can do to help that situation. Suggestions are very welcome!
  • We don’t have much step-by-step tutorials on how to get started and how to knit things together. We mostly provide reference manuals. I will appreciate help with improving this!

cURL