2025-09-14 04:37:52
Developers Day is a recent annual Swedish gala organized by the Stockholm-based company Developers Bay. This is its third year running.
They have an ambition to highlight and celebrate Swedish software developers (or perhaps it is developers based in Sweden?) and hand out a series of awards for that purpose.
A jury that consists of six persons receives nominations through-out the year and then they decide which of them who get awards in six different categories.
This year, I was graciously nominated as, and subsequently, awarded Developer of the year at the award gala on September 12, 2025.
The motivation, as shown in Swedish in the image above, translates into something like:
This year’s winner is a developer with a lifelong passion for technology and problem solving. His interest was awaken already in the 1980s with a commodore64 and has since grown into a career characterized by curiosity and drive. After starting his professional life at IBM, the developer has contributed to the open source world for a long time – both as a coder and as an ambassador for open collaboration. For this year’s winner, development is also a way to understand people and the most challenging part of technology is the collaboration between them. He created curl, one of the world’s most installed software products, with over 20 billion installations.
Getting recognition for my work and many years in software development is truly awesome and heartwarming. It energizes me and motivates me to go further. Clearly I must be doing something right!
I aspire to make top quality software entirely free and Open Source. I want to provided stellar tools and means for my fellow developers that make them productive and allow them to build awesome things. I try to explain what I do, how things work and I how I think things should be done, to perhaps in some small ways push things in the world in the appropriate direction.
Yeah, this is probably a little navel-gazing and inside baseball, as this is just a (small) company and its associated network that give out awards within a relatively small Swedish community by jury members who given their public bios do not have a terribly long or extensive experience out in the big wide world.
of the year? Yeah a quite legitimate question could be what special action or activity I have done in 2025 to earn the honor this particular time and not last year or next, but I think it simply boils down to the fact that someone nominated me this year.
Best developer? Comparing different persons working with completely different things in completely different areas and saying that one of them is “best” is certainly futile and of course not actually possible. We have numerous excellent developers in Sweden.
In spite of that, getting recognition in the form of an award is simply wonderful.
Thank you!
2025-09-10 13:49:32
Welcome to one of the more feature-packed curl releases we have had in a while. Exactly eight weeks since we shipped 8.15.0.
the 270th release
17 changes
56 days (total: 10,036)
260 bugfixes (total: 12,538)
453 commits (total: 36,025)
2 new public libcurl function (total: 98)
0 new curl_easy_setopt() option (total: 308)
3 new curl command line option (total: 272)
76 contributors, 39 new (total: 3,499)
32 authors, 17 new (total: 1,410)
2 security fixes (total: 169)
We publish two severity-low vulnerabilities in sync with this release:
We have a long range of changes this time:
--follow option
--out-null option
--parallel-max-host option to limit concurrent connections per host--retry-delay and --retry-max-time accept decimal seconds--longopt=value
NETRC environment variable (first) if setThe official bugfix count surpassed 250 this cycle and we have documented them all in the changelog, including links to most issues or pull-requests where they originated.
See the release presentation for a walk-through of some of the perhaps most interesting ones.
2025-09-09 14:57:52
One of these mantras I keep repeating is how we in the curl project keep improving, keep polishing and keep tightening every bolt there is. No one can do everything right from day one, but given time and will we can over time get a lot of things lined up in neat and tidy lines.
And yet new things creep up all the time that can be improved and taken yet a little further.
Back in the spring of 2025 we had an exercise at our curl up meeting in Prague. Jim Fuller played up an imaginary life-like scenario for a bunch of curl maintainers. In this role played major incident we got to consider how we would behave and what we would do in the curl project if something like Heartbleed or a serious breach occur.
It was a little of an eye opener for several of us. We realized we should probably get some more details written down and planned for.
We of course arrange for things and work on procedures and practices to the best of our abilities to make sure that there will never be any such major incident in the curl project. However, as we are all human and we all do mistakes, it would be foolish to think that we are somehow immune against incidents of the highest possible severity level. Rationally, we should just accept the fact that even though the risk is ideally really slim, it exists. It could happen.
We have now documented some guidelines about what exactly constitutes a major incident, how it is declared, some roles we need to shoulder while it is ongoing, with a focus on both internal and external communication, and how we declare that the incident has ended. It’s straight forward and quite simple.
Feel free to criticize or improve those if you find omissions or mistakes. I imagine that if we ever get to actually use these documented steps because of such a project-shaking event, we will get reasons to improve it. Until then we just need to apply our imagination and make sure it seems reasonable.
2025-09-08 15:10:50
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.
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.
2025-08-29 04:52:56
curl added support for OpenSSL immediately when it was first released, as they switched away from SSLeay, in the late 1990s.
We have since supported it over the decades as both OpenSSL and curl have developed.
A while back the OpenSSL project stopped updating their 1.0.x and 1.1.x public branches. This means that unless you are paying for support from someone, and only relies on the public open versions these OpenSSL releases are going to decay and soon be insecure choices. Nothing to rely on.
As a direct result of this, the curl project has decided to drop support for OpenSSL 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 soon.
We stop supporting OpenSSL 1.0.2 in December 2025.
We stop supporting OpenSSL 1.1.1 in June 2026.
Starting in June 2026, we plan to only support OpenSSL 3 and later. Of course with the caveat that we might change our minds or schedule as we go along and things happen.
All pending removals from curl are listed here.
Part of the reason for us dropping this support is the fact that basically only users who are already paying for OpenSSL support are the ones who are going to be using these versions.
We will offer commercial support for curl with OpenSSL 1.1.1 for as long as customers want it, even when support gets removed from the public curl version.
This news is for OpenSSL support only and does not affect the forks. We intend to keep supporting the whole fork family AmiSSL, AWS-LC, BoringSSL, LibreSSL and QuicTLS going forward as well.
2025-08-18 13:45:30
In August 16 2025 I did a keynote with this title on the FrOSCon conference in Bonn, Germany. The room held a few hundred seats and every single one was occupied with people also filling up the stairs and was standing along the walls. Awesome!
See also my death by slop post for more background.
The slides are available here.
