[Daniel's week] February 10th, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hi friends!

Another week passed.

## FOSDEM

The conference was back in its former glory and the level of attendance seemed
to be similar to that of the years before covid. The chaos, the excessive
number of tracks, the incredibly occasional niche talks, the beer, the crowds,
the lines to the food trucks, the waffles and of course the many friends.

This year I made a point of stocking up curl stickers in the wolfSSL booth and
I hung out there for a bit too which allowed me to meet with and talk to a lot
of people. Friends, users and yeah, I dare to use the word: fans. I was asked
to participate in selfies with people numerous times. I am certainly more than
happy to do that, even if I sometimes don't really know how to handle the
celebrity vibes. I even did autographs and a few signed stickers - even if I
cannot recommend the signing stickers thing because they are just too glossy
and hard to get any pen to write decently on.

I attended some good talks and learned new things, and I also got to taste a
lot of good Belgian beers and talk with many friends. This year I did not do
any talks myself, which was sort of relaxing and laid back. I think I will try
to cook something up to talk about next year. Because I will most certainly go
back.

I handed out over one THOUSAND curl stickers during the weekend and now I'm
all out.

## GitHub Badge

GitHub ran a social event on the FOSDEM Saturday. Me and a bunch of friends
attended, and while there I was one of the lucky ones who won a fancy e-ink
badge in the lottery [3].

## NASA

By the time I had to leave FOSDEM to head over to the airport for my trip back
home, Dr Steve Crawford of NASA entered the stage at the biggest room at
FOSDEM and did a closing keynote.

He talked about NASA's use of Open Source, and on slide 28 he showed a
screenshot of a tweet of mine from 2021 when I was complaining about NASA
repeatedly sending emails to me asking about curl details [2].

Lots of friends highlighted this for me and wow, it would have been a blast to
have been in the room when that occurred.

## Websockets

I landed more WebSocket fixes this week. It not only makes the code and API
better, it also shows that we have a few users actually trying it out and
provide feedback to us. It has made me start to believe for real that we will
be able to push the WebSocket API forward and maybe remove the experimental
tag from it later this year.

## New dev machine

After last week's adventures with my new PC, I have moved it over to my
house. I booted it and I have started the slow work of setting it up the way I
want it and moving over data from the previous work horse. I will write a
separate blog post will all the details later, including some benchmarks to
compare performance on the old vs the new.

I think I'll do the big switch immediately after I have done the release next
week.

## Roadmap

I have asked around for input. Around this time of the year I try to put down
a few things I think could be worth working on a little extra to see happen
during the year. Of course paying customers will have slightly more to say to
guide me, but in I primarily want curl to keep up with the times and go where
the Internet leads us.

I will do a separate webinar on the topic later (on March 23rd), but I am
rather confident I will end up at least including these five areas: http3,
WebSocket, HTTPS records, ECH and hyper. Which incidentally has some overlap
with what my roadmap plan said last year...

## Release prep

I am busy writing details in the release blog post while also merging the
final bugfixes that are coming in. 7.88.0 will ship in the morning my time on
Wednesday February the 15th. There will of course be a live-streamed video
presentation on that day, as the tradition goes.

On that day we will also publish three security advisories, which of course
all are fixed in that release.

## Birthday prep

The 7.88.0 release is meant to become the final curl version 7 release. We are
then looking forward to curl's 25th birthday and the 8.0.0 release, both which
will happen on the same day: Match 20th, 2023. This also means that we will
not open the feature window between these two releases, with the hope that
this should help us make 8.0.0 a well polished release.

We've created a celebration thread [1] over in the curl discussions on GitHub
if you want to send your best wishes, curl memories or just want to read what
others have to say.

## Coming up

  - curl release on Wednesday
  - restock on curl stickers
  - switch dev machines and get some performance numbers

[1] = https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/10465
[2] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/07/closing-the-nasa-loop/
[3] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/02/06/a-badger-bagde-for-bagder/


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  / daniel.haxx.se