James Fuller was our man on the ground in Prague. He found the venue, organized most of the event and made it another curl up success. Thank you! The curl up series started in 2017 and is our annual curl developers meetup, but since it was converted to online only for a few years through Covid, this was only our fifth physical event.

We managed to cram in no less than sixteen curl related presentations over the weekend. Some fifteen eager hackers had gathered for this years event, as per usual a whole bunch of registered attendees decided to not show up. We did not let that stop us or bring us down.

In person

I think we all feel that there is value in meeting up in person every once in a while, as it helps us cooperate and work better together the rest of the time.

This time, a handful of the regular old-timers attended, and a number of less regular contributors and even a set of local interested hackers decided to take the opportunity – which is so lovely to see. We love to share our knowledge with others, and getting fresh eyes and feedback from people with different views and experiences helps us!

We talked. At the conference itself of course but also over lunches, dinners, coffee breaks and beers.

Recordings

We streamed the entire event live on Twitch and recorded all the sessions. Because we are a tiny team without any dedicated video enthusiasts etc, we of course ran into some technical snags that made us mostly botch the two initial talks (by me and Stefan Eissing) and then we gradually improved the recordings through the event. We still have fourteen talks on video now available on YouTube.

You can also head over to the curl up 2025 agenda page, and find links to the recorded talks and their corresponding slide-sets.

I have a fair idea now how we should go about this next year! And yeah, it probably involves me getting a new laptop that can actually handle the task a little gentler. At these times, my ten year old work horse certainly shows its age. It was not even considered powerful when it was new.

Sponsors

We reimburse travel and hotel expenses for top contributors to attend curl up and we make the event a free-to-attend one to remove friction and really not make it about the cost. We can only do this of course thanks to our awesome project sponsors.

Next time

We intend to run curl up again in 2026, but we do not yet know where. Ideally in another European capital that is easy reachable by plane. If you want to help us make it happen in your city, please reach out!

Soon, in the first weekend of May 2025, we are gathering curl enthusiasts in a room in the wonderful city Prague and we talk curl related topics over two full days. We call it curl up 2025.

curl up is our annual curl event and physical meetup. It is a low key and casual event that usually attract somewhere between twenty and thirty people.

We sit down in a room and talk about curl related topics. Share experiences, knowledge, ideas and insights.

Get all your questions answered. Get all your curiosity satisfied. Tell the others what you do with curl and what you think the curl project should know.

Attend!

We want broad attendance. The curl developers sure, but we also love to see newcomers and curl users show up and share their stories, join the conversations and get the opportunity to meet the team and maybe learn new stuff from the wonderful world of Internet transfers.

The event is free to attend, you just need to register ahead of time. You find the registration link on the curl up 2025 information page.

Sponsor!

curl is a small and independent Open Source project. Your sponsorship could help us pay to get core developers to this conference and help cover other costs we have to run it. And your company would get cool exposure while you help us improve a little piece of internet infrastructure. Win win!

Physical meetings have merit

This is the only meetup in the real world we organize in the curl project. In my experience it serves as an incredible energy and motivation boost and it helps us understand each other better. We all communicate a little smoother once we have gotten to know and “the persons” behind the online names or aliases.

After having met physically, we cooperate better.

On Friday May 3, 2024 I had several of my curl friends over for dinner in my house. An unusually warm and sunny spring day with a temperature reaching twenty degrees centigrade.

The curl up 2024 weekend started excellently and the following morning we all squeezed ourselves into a conference room in downtown Stockholm. I had rented a room in a hotel in the city center for two days.

curl up is never a big meeting/conference but we have in the past sometimes been around twenty-five attendees. This year’s amount of fifteen was the smallest so far, but in this small set of people we have a set of long-term well-known curl contributors. It is not a big list of attendees that creates a good curl up.

Swag

We started by making sure every attendee got their needs of curl t-shirts, curl mugs, curl stickers and curl coasters satisfied. The t-shirts of the year are “forest green” with the curl logo in white on the front and the curl symbol slightly larger on the back.

I have spare t-shirts that I intend to distribute to people I meet over the coming year. Before you ask: no, there is no way to buy these.

Recordings

I had tested my external microphone setup at home but it just refused to work when at the venue. We struggled for a while until we had to surrender and fall back to using the built-in microphone in the webcam that we used for recording the video. This is why the sound is low in all recordings we did. A little disappointing. Sorry for this.

I live-streamed the entire event over twitch. We had in total over 460 unique viewers over the days and at times at least we had over 30 concurrent sustained viewers. This made us at least sometimes have twice the size audience online as in the room. In spite of the sound issue.

I also noticed that my trusty old laptop was maybe a little weak for this purpose as it struggled to stream and save the recordings at high frame rates.

Day one

The state of curl 2024

Where are we, what did we do last year or so? Who did the work? How often? How much?

Evolutions

Apparently this is not a real word, but Stefan Eissing pushes for language development in this presentation where he talks about changes and improvements he worked on in curl over the last few years.

Fuzzing curl

James Fuller talks about his work on generating “fun” curl command lines in order to find those that might not be handled correctly.

Implementing parallel testing

Dan Fandrich talks about the journey from serial to fully parallel tests in curl.

curl containers

James is back and talks about where the curl containers are right now.

Security

I talk about the security situation in curl as of right now and the last year.

End of day 1

We topped off this packed day with a twenty minute walk through a sunny Stockholm down to the water where we could sit outside and have a few drinks before we moved over to the restaurant where we ended the evening with a joint dinner. A great first day!

Day two

The nice weather was gone. The temperature dropped ten degrees and the rain poured down most of this day.

HTTP/1/2/3 Performance

Stefan Eissing warms up the day. About his work on HTTP refactors and related performance improvements.

trurl

This is the newcomer in the curl family and I talked a little about what it is and why it exists.

Apple Specialties

Christian has improved curl on Apple devices, which he talks about.

rust in curl

You can build curl to use third party components written in rust. This is where we are now and what might happen next. Or not.

Test clutch

Dan talks about his work on improving curl tests and their reliability.

Future

We don’t know much about the future but there are some plans and there are at least some ideas…

End of curl up 2024

The rest of day two was mostly spent hanging out and talking about life, the universe and various things curl. People started leaving and by five o’clock we shut the door for the last time this time around. We had survived curl up 2024.

After all these talks, discussions, dinners, beers, coffees, challenging questions, brainstorms over 48 hours, I was exhausted and drained of energy. Apart from the recording problem, I think almost everything else in the event organization went as smoothly as we could have wished for. The venue, the food, the coffee etc worked perfectly for us.

Planning ahead for 2025

We will most certainly run another curl up event in 2025 in roughly the same frame of the year as we did now. The idea is then to visit another capital city in Europe. Stay tuned for coming announcements of date and location for that.

In June of 2022 we intended to run the curl up 2022 curl conference in person, in California.

Unfortunately, I had the bad taste of catching covid exactly when I was about to use my new US visa for the first time, so I had to remain at home and because of that we cancelled the whole event.

Try again

Now we try again. The curl up 2022 take 2 will be an all-virtual event that is going to be a long Zoom-session with a number of presentations and discussion slots. Feel free to join in for what you want and stay away from the sessions that don’t interest you. We will make our best to keep the schedule, and the agenda will be available ahead of time for you to plan your attendance around.

On September 15, 2022 we will start the show at 15:00 CEST and we have a program that is a full day. Join when you want, leave, come back. You decide.

Sign up!

Agenda

The Agenda is almost complete. The presentations will be done live or be provided prerecorded. The prerecorded talks will still be discussed and have Q&As live afterwards.

Speak!

There is still room left to add some speakers. If you use curl/libcurl somewhere and want to tell us about things you’ve learned and things libcurl devs should learn, come do it! Or anything else that is related to curl or Internet transfers. Big or small – even just 5 minutes works!

This is a day for sharing info, spreading knowledge and having fun.

Attend!

Yeah, sign up and come hang out with us and watch a range of curl related talks. I think you will learn things and I think it will be a lot of fun.

The curl up hours spelled out in different time zones:

• PDT 6:00 – 15:00 (US west coast)
• EDT 9:00 – 18:00 (US east coast)
• UTC 13:00 – 22:00
• CEST 15:00 – 00:00 (central Europe)
• IST 18:30 – 03:30 (India)
• CST 21:00 – 06:00 (China)
• JST 22:00 – 07:00 (Japan)
• AEST 23:00 – 08:00 (Sidney, Autralia)
• NZST 01:00 – 09:00 (New Zealand) (This is on the 16th)

On June 6 2022, we will gather a bunch of curl aficionados in the Firehouse at the Fort Mason Centre in San Francisco, USA.

All details can be found here. We will add more info and details as we get closer to the event.

curl up is the annual curl developers and users “conference” where we meet up over a day and talk curl, curl related topics and share ideas about curl, its present and and its future. It is also really the only time of the year where we actually get to meet fellow curl hackers in person. The only day of the year that is completely devoted to curl. The best kind of day!

The last two years we have not run the conference for covid reasons but now we are back. The first time we arrange the event outside Europe.

I fully realize this geographic choice will prevent some of our European friends and contributors from attending, it will also allow North Americans to join the fun for the first time.

We help contributors attend

To better allow and encourage top curl contributors to attend this event, no matter where you live, we will help cover travel and lodging expenses for all and any top-100 curl committers who wants to come.

Sign up

Head over to the curl up 2022 page to find the link and details.

Agenda

Over the coming month I hope we can create an agenda with curl talks from several people. I need your ideas and your talks. We have started to collect some ideas for the 2022 agenda.

Tell us what you want to hear and what you want to share with us!

Who will be there?

I will of course be there and I hope we can attract a decent set of additional contributors, but also curl users and fans of all kinds and types.

Yes I can enter the country

Lots of you remember my struggles in the past to get permission to enter the US, but that was resolved a while ago. No problems remain.

Credits

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

curl up 2021 happened today.

We had five presentations done, all prerecorded and made available before the event. At the Sunday afternoon we gathered to discuss the presentations and everything around those topics.

The presentations

1. The state of curl 2021 – Daniel Stenberg
2. curl security 2021 – Daniel Stenberg
3. libcurl under the hood – Daniel Stenberg
4. Interfacing rust – Stefan Eissing
5. Curl profiling – Jim Fuller.

Discussions

We were not very many who actually joined the meeting, and out of the people in the meeting a majority decided to be spectators only and remained muted with their cameras off.

It turned out as a two hour long mostly casual talk among me, Stefan Eissing and Emil Engler about the presentations and related topics. Toward the end, Kamil Dudka appeared.

The three of us get to talk about roadmap items, tests, security, writing code that interfaces modules written in rust and what more details in the libcurl internals that could use further descriptions and documentation.

The video

The agenda in the video is roughly following the agenda order in the 2021 wiki page and the discussion topics mentioned there.

Sponsored

Thanks to wolfSSL for sponsoring the video meeting account used!

The annual curl developers conference, curl up, is being held in Berlin this year; May 9-10 2020.

Starting now, you can register to the event to be sure that you have a seat. The number of available seats is limited.

Register here

curl up is the main (and only?) event of the year where curl developers and enthusiasts get together physically in a room for a full weekend of presentations and discussions on topics that are centered around curl and its related technologies.

We move the event around to different countries every year to accommodate different crowds better and worse every year – and this time we’re back again in Germany – where we once started the curl up series back in 2017.

The events are typically small with a very friendly spirit. 20-30 persons

Sign up

We will only be able to let you in if you have registered – and received a confirmation. There’s no fee – but if you register and don’t show, you lose karma.

The curl project can even help fund your travel and accommodation expenses (if you qualify). We really want curl developers to come!

Register here

Date

May 9-10 2020. We’ll run the event both days of that weekend.

Agenda

The program is not done yet and will not be so until just a week or two before the event, and then it will be made available => here.

We want as many voices as possible to be heard at the event. If you have done something with curl, want to do something with curl, have a suggestion etc – even just short talk will be much appreciated. Or if you have a certain topic or subject you really want someone else to speak about, let us know as well!

Expect topics to be about curl, curl internals, Internet protocols, how to improve curl, what to not do in curl and similar.

Location

We’ll be in the co.up facilities in central Berlin. On Adalbertstraße 8.

Planning and discussions on curl-meet

Everything about the event, planning for it, volunteering, setting it up, agenda bashing and more will be done on the curl-meet mailing list, dedicated for this purpose. Join in!

Anti Google?

If you have a problem with filling in the Google-hosted registration form, please email us at [email protected] instead and we’ll ask you for the information over email instead.

Credits

The images were taken by me, Daniel. The top one at the Nuremburg curl up in 2017, the in-article photo in Stockholm 2018.

We’re running a short poll asking people about where and how we should organize curl up 2020 – our annual curl developers conference. I’m not making any promises, but getting people’s opinions will help us when preparing for next year.

Take the poll

I’ll leave the poll open for a couple of days so please respond asap.