[Daniel's week] November 10, 2023

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hello.

This week, emailed from a train.

## Polhem Prize

On the Wednesday evening I did my annual tradition that started back in 2017
when I myself was given this award. I put on my suit and went to the Polhem
Prize award dinner. It was a grand and fun event as always. A three-course
fancy dinner. Fellow distinguished engineers everywhere at the table makes the
socializing ever so interesting while the winners are celebrated through-out
the evening. Apart from the grand prize, there are also two smaller ones that
are also handed out and presented during the evening.

The award is given to a Swedish engineering accomplishment and this year
Christopher Ahlberg och Staffan Truvé were awarded it [1].

A fun side-story from the evening: there was entertainment during the evening
in the form of short "magic shows" by an illusionist. One of Sweden's leading
ones. His name is Charlie Caper and he pulled off a series truly mind-blowing
tricks and stunts, one of them even involving a little robotic miniature of
himself. After the dinner, I ended up chatting with Charlie about his show and
his work on it. It did not take very long until he revealed himself as a long
time curl fan. Luckily I had a few stickers with me that I could offer as I
accepted taking a selfie with him.

## Pycon Stockholm

Early Thursday morning I took the subway in to Stockholm City and I had the
great honor of keynoting the Pycon Stockholm [3] conference.

I personally am not particularly knowledgeable or into Python so I decided
that I could still find a subject that is close to us all and that I do know
something about: being an open source maintainer. I titled it "you can do it"
and told a story based on my own curl journey about how it might require time
to reach success, how we all do mistakes, how humans are harder to deal with
that code and that the impostor syndrome is real.

Writing a completely new presentation and running it in front of 300 persons
is certainly reason enough for getting a little nervous. It was perhaps a
little rough in the edges but I think the main points went home almost better
than expected and I received lots of praise and encouraging words about it
from many attendees afterwards. Not to mention that the amount of questions
after the talk seemed never-ending.

It felt like a friendly conference with that casual and cozy atmosphere you
like. I did attend two other talks, had lunch and handed out a bunch curl
stickers before I had to dash to my next engagement.

## Oredev

I took a train down south to Malmö. Once I had checked in to my hotel, I met
up with Varnish-Simon and kodsnack-Fredrik. We caught up and had pizza before
we ended up at the hotel sky bar where we were joined by several other
friendly people. People who were in town there to attend the Oredev conference
[4], the one I was there to speak at on the Friday.

It really never gets old seeing the expression in people's faces and hearing
their voices when someone mentions that I am the curl founder. That typically
requires a whole series of confirmations and clarifying questions to most of
which I answer "yes" and "that's me". It is also apparently also a decent way
to get friends and have them buy me beers.

Lots of curl stickers were distributed.

At 10:10 on Friday morning I delivered my talk "HTTP/3, why and where are we?"
in the room called "debug" at the Oredev conference. The room was packed with
maybe two hundred attendees and a few standing in the back. Not the biggest
room in the conference but I believe every available chair was occupied.

I have done public talks about HTTP/3 for many years by now in front of
countless audiences in numerous conferences. I always make sure to refresh the
material for every occasion so that they never get exactly the same, and this
was no exception. I managed to use the time pretty good and I got a range of
really good questions from an interested audience.

## RFC 9460

A curious detail that spiced up my HTTP/3 presentation a little is that RFC
9460 [2] "Service Binding and Parameter Specification via the DNS (SVCB and
HTTPS Resource Records)" was published earlier this week and I could insert a
mention of and reference to that. HTTPS records is something we want to add
support for in curl but we haven't gotten around to yet.

## curling

Back in August [5] I posted a picture on Mastodon of someone's curling gear
with a curl sticker on it. I just thought it was such a fun meta joke that I
could not resist sharing it with the world. As a response to that image,
another (jealous) curling enthusiast reached out and wanted the chance to do
the same thing and as I sent off a bunch of stickers I asked for some photos
of the deed once done and this week a set of totally awesome photos [6] were
delivered.

I am a happy sticker supplier.

## Coming up

- curl feature freeze tomorrow
- mastering libcurl part one [7] on Thursday

## Links

[1] = https://www.polhemspriset.se/polhemspriset-2023/
[2] = https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9460.html
[3] = https://www.pycon.se/
[4] = https://oredev.org/
[5] = https://mastodon.social/@bagder/110813446928781130
[6] = https://infosec.town/notes/9lpo1nyugrc3j95w
[7] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/11/01/mastering-libcurl/

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se