[Daniel's week] August 23, 2025

[Daniel Stenberg]

# August 23, 2025

Hi friends. I just crossed midnight here so I had to change the subject as the 
date changed. Anyway, things happened this week as well!

## rc1

I kicked off the week with putting together and uploading the first release
candidate for the pending curl 8.16.0 version [1]. It triggered some minor
disturbances in the force but nothing major and it feels like we are in a
pretty good place.

We have merged a fairly large amount of changes and introduce a larger number
of features in this pending release than what we use to so the regression risk
is imminent and certainly even larger than usually. Luckily we have users
around who test our rc builds and we will do two more before the actual
release.

## quiz

I have had a slow-going idea for a long time to put together a site or
something that would be able to ask a user a number of curl questions and
grade the user's curlability score based on that. Then, last week someone
emailed me and asked about help with curl questions for a quiz they were
making and voila, the planets aligned perfectly and I created the curl-quiz
repository [2] that now is meant to slowly grow a set of questions. I have
added an initial set and I have some more in the queue to add. Hopefully I
will get assistance doing this as well. Some early contributors have already
added questions.

Once we have a set that is large enough, I might toy around with setting up a
site around it to ask N random questions from the set. Could be fun. Of course
we need quite a lot more questions first before that could happen.

## nominated

This week it was made public that I am nominated to a Swedish award they call
"developer of the year" [3] together with two other developers. The award gala
in which the winner is to be appointed happens on September 12 and I intend to
be there, if even to be told I'm number two or number three. (The site is
entirely in Swedish.)

Remember how I was rated developer number two in Sweden back in 2016? [4]

## video

At the risk of getting totally spoiled, I spent several hours with a
film-maker this week; answering questions, faking work in front of a keyboard
and even casually walking outdoors while being filed with a drone. The purpose
was to produce a short film about me and curl for an upcoming thing that is
supposed to remain a secret for a while longer. But believe me, it is fun. I
promise I won't let you miss it when it goes public.

## slop talk

Within a week of my AI slop talk having gone up on YouTube [5] it has been
viewed over 5,000 times. This video also has a for me unusually high frequency
of likes and comments. Fun!

## CONNECT-UDP

This week a true monster 4,600 lines pull-request against curl [6]. It
introduces support for HTTP/3 over HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 proxies, as well as
HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 done over an HTTP/3 proxy.

This is of course something we want to see land in curl, but this huge change
is complicated to receive so it might take a little time.

## HTTP Workshop

Mark Nottingham announced that the seventh HTTP Workshop is on [7] for 2026:
14-16 July in Basel, Switzerland. I have attended every previous workshop and
as I think these are some of the best events I will certainly apply for and
aim at going to this edition as well. The HTTP Workshop is an event for hard
core HTTP enthusiasts and implementers to meet and discuss HTTP for a few
days. Quite simply the best place to be for someone into HTTP as much as I am.

## curl on BBC

Neil Craig disclosed on Mastodon [8] that on the single day of April 18 2025,
the two sites www.bbc.co.uk and www.bbc.com saw "just over 1 million requests"
done with curl. These one million curl transfers were done using 161 different
versions!

Interestingly, the single most common curl version they recorded was 7.29.0
which did almost 13% of the requests.

## Open Source Summit Europe

On this Monday, August 25 I will be in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and keynote
the Open Source Summit Europe [9] 10:25 in the morning. The title of reads
"giants, standing on the shoulders of". How it is to maintain a well-used Open
Source project in 2025. Fifteen minutes is not a long time but I will try to
make the best of it.

## Coming up

- Heading to Amsterdam on Sunday afternoon, back home late Monday evening
- Monday: curl 8.16.0-rc2 happens, probably when I get back home

## Links

[1] = https://curl.se/rc/
[2] = https://github.com/curl/quiz
[3] = https://www.developersday.se/
[4] = https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/12/01/2nd-best-in-sweden/
[5] = https://youtu.be/6n2eDcRjSsk
[6] = https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/18331
[7] = https://github.com/HTTPWorkshop/workshop2026
[8] = https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/18331
[9] = https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se