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cURL and libcurl

giants, standing on the shoulders of

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This was the title of my keynote at the Open Source Summit Europe 2025 conference in Amsterdam that I delivered on August 25, 2025.

The giants, as in fact large parts of modern infrastructure, stand on the shoulders of Open Source projects and their maintainers. But maybe these projects and people are not treated in optimal ways.

The slides are available.

My slot allowed me 15 minutes and I completed my presentation with around two minutes left. I have rarely received so many positive comments as after this talk.

Credits

The painting in the top image, The Colossus (also known as The Giant), is traditionally attributed to Francisco de Goya but might actually have been made by his friend Asensio Juliá.

cURL and libcurl

Presentation: curl from start to end

On Tuesday January 21st 2025, at 16:00 CET (15:00 UTC) I will do a presentation titled as per above. I have not done this one before.

The talk will be a detailed explainer and step-by-step going through exactly what happens when a curl command line is typed into a shell and the return key is pressed. As the image below illustrates.

The talk will be live-streamed on twitch, and will be recorded and hosted on YouTube after the fact. For free of course, no signup. Just show up.

Those who join the live-stream chat can of course also ask questions live in the following Q&A.

The recording

cURL and libcurl, Security

Talk: Keeping the world from Burning

On Monday this week, I did a talk at the Nordic Software Security Summit conference in Stockholm Sweden. I titled it CVEMITRECVSSNVDCNAOSS WTF with the subtitle “Keeping the world from Burning”.

The talk was well received and I think it added something to the conversation. Almost every other talk during the rest of the conference that I saw referred back to it.

Since the talk was not recorded (no talks were at this event), I intend to do the presentation again – from home. This time live-streamed and recorded.

This happens on:

Monday September 30, 2024
14:00 UTC (16:00 CEST)

The stream happens on Twitch where I as always am curlhacker. Join the chatroom, ask questions, have a good time. There will of course be room for a Q&A.

No registration. No fee. Just show up.

At the conference, I did the presentation in under thirty minutes. This version might go on a few more minutes.

Abstract

The abstract I provided for this talk to the conference says:

Bogus CVEs, know-better organizations, conflicting databases, AI hallucinations, inflated severity scoring, security scanners, Jia Tan. As the lead developer in the curl project, Daniel describes some of the challenges involved and what you need to do to stay on top of security when working in a high profile Open Source project running in some twenty billion instances. The talk will be involving many examples from real life.

Differences

Since this is a second run of a talk I already did and I have no script, it will not be identical. I will also try to polish some minor details that I felt could need some brush-ups.

Recording

cURL and libcurl

FOSDEM 2024: you too could have made curl

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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.

cURL and libcurl

My upcoming FOSDEM 2024

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.

Broom not included: curling the modern way

That’s the title of my talk in the Network devroom. It is scheduled to take place at 10:50 on Saturday February 3rd. In room UB5.230.

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.

The talk is 50 minutes. It happens at 10:00 Sunday February 4th in room K1.105 (La Fontaine).

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.

Development, Open Source

Uncurled – the presentation

Uncurled – everything I know and learned about running and maintaining Open Source projects for three decades.

This is me, doing a live English-speaking presentation/webinar on these topics that I cover in my book: Uncurled.

Recording

Date: Tuesday August 23, 2022

Time: 10: 00 UTC (12:00 CEST)

Where: over zoom [Sign up]

The plan is to record this session and make it available after the fact on YouTube. This post will be updated with a link to that once it exists.

Agenda

Here’s the outlook on what I hope to be able to cover in a 40 minutes talk.

This will be followed by a Q&A-session with me answering any questions you might have. Feel most welcome and encouraged to submit your questions ahead of time if you already have some! (comment here, email me, comment or DM on Twitter, send a carrier pigeon, anything!)

I have not done this presentation before. I know the subject very intimately so I have no worries about that. The timing of the thing is what is going to be my bigger challenge I think. I aim for no more than 40 minutes of me blabbing.

cURL and libcurl, wolfSSL

curl better – video

As so many other events in these mysterious times, the foss-north conference went online-only and on March 30, 2020 I was honored to be included among the champion speakers at this lovely conference and I talked about how to “curl better” there.

The talk is a condensed run-through of how curl works and why, and then a look into how some of the more important HTTP oriented command line options work and how they’re supposed to be used.

As someone pointed out: I don’t do a lot of presentations about the curl tool. Maybe I should do more of these.

curl is widely used but still most users only use a very small subset of options or even just copy their command line from somewhere else. I think more users could learn to curl better. Below is the video of this talk.

Doing a talk to a potentially large audience in front of your laptop in completely silence and not seeing a single audience member is a challenge. No “contact” with the audience and no feel for if they’re all going to sleep or seem interested etc. Still I have the feeling that this is the year we all are going to do this many times and hopefully get better at it over time…

Network, Web

HTTP/3 for everyone

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.

The audience, photographed by Sidsel Jensen who had to sit in the stairs…
Photo by Mirza Krak
Photo by Wolfgang Gassler

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.

Open Source, wolfSSL

Coming to FOSDEM 2020

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)