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2021-Changelog-Interviews-Transcripts

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**Adam Stacoviak:** March 20.
**Daniel Stenberg:** 1998.
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow.
**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
**Daniel Stenberg:** That's also a bit arbitrary, since that's the first release I actually called it Curl, since I actually called the tool with now the name before that... And maybe I should count that as a -- but I don't. So March 20th, 1998 I released Curl for the first time.
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha.
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the good thing is you're in charge, so you can make those choices if you like, right?
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yes.
**Adam Stacoviak:** We can give those extra two years to you, so it could actually be 25 years of something...
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Yeah, we can round it off...
**Adam Stacoviak:** We can round it off for you if you want...
**Jerod Santo:** It's like time travel.
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that would actually make a good show. 25 years of Curl, instead of 23.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Right. And since I've changed the name twice before that, I can have many birthdays.
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Why not.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Many opportunities here.
**Adam Stacoviak:** And since it's a multiverse, we can have infinite options and opportunities \[unintelligible 00:03:44.19\] But that's good. I mean, the internet was different back in 1998.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Oh, yes...
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[03:52\] Way different, right? The problem set, the internet itself, the needs for APIs, the needs for doing what Curl does as a tool has changed drastically, and so many more use cases have come into play.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, and I think back in those days - of course, nobody really knew where it was going, or that HTTP would become this protocol that everyone would use for APIs, and REST, and everything. That was just a big unknown, so... It just happened.
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah.
**Daniel Stenberg:** And of course, I didn't know where Curl would go either, because in 1998 that was 2,000 lines of code; just a tiny little tool.
**Jerod Santo:** What was your initial desire? What was your initial use case? Just grab a website?
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, I was going to just download currency rates for my IRC bot.
**Jerod Santo:** Okay...
**Daniel Stenberg:** I wanted a little tool to just -- you know, every day maybe download currency rates from a site, and you hosted currency rates.
**Jerod Santo:** You're a Forex trader, or what?
**Daniel Stenberg:** No, I had a bot in an IRC channel, so you could just have a currency rate translation service in the chat... So "Hey both, what's 100 USD in Swedish Kronor today?|
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Now we ask Siri that.
**Jerod Santo:** "Hey, Siri..."
**Daniel Stenberg:** Exactly.
**Adam Stacoviak:** At least we try...
**Jerod Santo:** And then she says "Here's what I've found on the internet for..." \[laughter\] She probably uses Curl in that process, don't you think, Daniel?
**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, my exchange was roughly the same... \[laughter\] It was rather crappy. But still, that's why I started looking into HTTP and getting HTTP then.
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's important to note that big things have small beginnings.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Oh, yeah. Everything starts somewhere. That was my humble beginning. And then, of course, I released that, and in some years I found some bugs, and I did some requests, "Maybe we should do this..." Then I found another site that hosted currency rates on Gopher, so I added support for Gopher, and th...
**Jerod Santo:** It's snowballed.
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah.
**Jerod Santo:** So if you fast-forward to now and you gave the same answer to the same question, what was your most recent use of Curl that wasn't some sort of development, "I'm working on Curl" thing? Do you use it as just a regular user?
**Daniel Stenberg:** I actually use it embarrassingly little these days. I still use it for simple cases, but more like my ordinary command line style, and Unixy guy... "Yeah, I wanna script something and I have Curl \[unintelligible 00:06:21.13\]" So I rarely use it very complicated, because that would mean working wi...
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was gonna say, you're now full-time, right?
**Daniel Stenberg:** Yeah, exactly... Which of course has changed things for me around a bit.
**Jerod Santo:** And you were with Mozilla previously... Tell us the story. How did you go full-time?
**Daniel Stenberg:** Well, I quit Mozilla in late 2018, for reasons -- mostly because I was bored with that job. I didn't think it developed me anything, and enough fun... So I decided to quit that and do something else. And then I looked at what I could do and what I wanted to do after that. I talked to my friends at ...
I knew them from before, and then I decided that I would join wolfSSL, work with Curl full-time, and sell support for Curl commercially, for anyone who wants it. So basically companies who need help, or whatever assistance they need regarding Curl.
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. And it's working out well for you?
**Daniel Stenberg:** It does, it works really great. It's a little bit of a dream come true, since now, finally what I created back in the late '90s I can now sort of -- you know, taking it all the way as a spare time project for this long, and now suddenly I can do it for a living... And only that. I don't have to sav...
**Jerod Santo:** So there's this weird phenomenon that happens to people when their hobby becomes their job. Their passion project, their weekend warrior side gig that they love becomes their 9 to 5. And we see it all the time. Adam and I in a certain way have done that, like our hobby. Adam, this started as a hobby, r...
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:19\] It sure did, yeah.
**Jerod Santo:** And now you're podcasting professionally. And it's like "Now this is my job." And something that you just desired to work on and you wanted to do because you loved it, all of a sudden you have to do it, because that's how you make money. Has that changed your perspective on the work, Daniel?