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**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[03:56\] So we're kind of like across so many different timezones... Always fun to have those shows. The benefit of the internet. So tell us a little bit about yourselves, and your intro question will be not an animal that starts with the first letter of your name, but WHEN did you start using... |
**Matt Holt:** Mohammed, you go first. |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Okay. I started playing around with Go sometime in 2014. In 2013 I was doing a program of networks and system administration and I was chatting with a friend who's a software engineer, and he kept telling me there is a new language called Go by Google... And it returns the errors, so you're fo... |
In 2014 I was doing a web dev job as my full-time. We were a Java shop, and I was so much annoyed by Java that I decided to look into this new language my friend has been bugging me about. I got hooked since then. |
**Matt Holt:** Very cool. I started writing Go probably about ten years ago now. Ten or eleven years ago, right around Go 1. Because our company was a .NET shop, and we were looking at easier to deploy, faster alternatives, and just kind of a more fun language overall. So then I started using it, and we wrote a couple ... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** What was the web server that you were using at work back at that time? |
**Matt Holt:** It was a mix of NGINX or Apache, whichever had better copy-paste examples... I could never figure Apache out at least. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah. But also, NGINX was not very straightforward without those examples, I would say. At least for me. |
**Jon Calhoun:** My experience with both of those has been you figure out enough to get whatever you need done done, and then you forget about it in six months, so then you have to figure it all out again. So nobody really understands it, they just learn enough to do what they need to do. |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah. There's a lot of moving parts, too. I've found myself setting up four or five different components just to get a basic website up and running... So I wanted to kind of simplify things. |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** So it's pretty much like the XKDC comic of Git, except it's now web servers. |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah, I suppose so. |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** You call up the friend who knows how to \[unintelligible 00:06:08.13\] |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah. |
**Jon Calhoun:** I wonder if these days, Matt, you're making it worse... Because more of the people I talk with are using Caddy. So finding people who know how to use NGINX and Apache is gonna become a rarity, and when you've got a company relying on it, that could be a problem. |
**Matt Holt:** I don't see that as a problem. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Well... It could be a problem for that company, for a short period at least. |
**Matt Holt:** It could be. We are encouraging all companies to switch to Caddy. |
**Jon Calhoun:** So I guess we can jump into the Caddy stuff then... Because I think - Natalie, correct me if I'm wrong; I think the goal is to talk a little bit about Caddy and then start talking about this project Mohammed is working on as well, and going in a little more depth there. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, definitely. And for those who are less familiar with the -- for the two people who are listening that are slightly less familiar with Caddy... So far, those people figured out that we're talking about a web server. What is special about that web server? Unlike NGINX and friends... |
**Matt Holt:** Well, you'll find that it comes with all the benefits of a Go program. So it's easy to deploy, and it has no external dependencies, and it has memory safety, which you don't get from C servers like Apache, NGINX and Envoy... And with Caddy 2 we have made it kind of a very powerful platform on which you c... |
And probably the thing that people mostly talk about when they think about what's special about Caddy is that it uses HTTPS by default. So it's the only server that does that automatically and by default, without needing any config; it will just try and make TLS work for your site, and manage that all automatically. |
**Jon Calhoun:** \[08:06\] See, I can say for myself that was pretty much the original draw to Caddy, was - you wanna set up some sort of HTTPS, and setting it up in other places has always historically been a pain in the butt. I remember the first time I had to get a certificate, and I was probably a teenager at the t... |
**Matt Holt:** Yup. There's a few others. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Seeing different companies like that that are offering much easier options out of the box has been pretty awesome. Alright, so Matt - Caddy is written in Go entirely; is that correct? |
**Matt Holt:** Yup. Pure Go. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Okay. And Mohammed... You, I believe, wrote an extension. So Matt was saying that it's extensible... Can you verify that that's easy to do? Can you talk a little bit about that process? |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Oh, it made my life a lot simpler. I only had to focus on the logic of the SSH server as in authentication, session management, and PTY, and all of that... And that was a breeze, because I didn't need to write any of the logic for the listeners, and the reload management and the config managem... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** You said that you're a Gopher in the evenings, and by day you are a project manager... So why going on a web server as a fun project? Was that a need, was that just something fun that you've found? |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Yeah... My day job is not into the software development side of things. It's still related to tech; I'm a product manager of the payment gateway at a local bank. So I don't get to practice programming day by day. And programming at night, in the evening is basically my stress relief. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And from all the projects, a web server is the interesting one? |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Well, Caddy was fun enough, and interesting, and easy to contribute to. There are a lot of sides and angles that you can nibble at, and at the time - whenever I started getting involved, the Caddy versioning tool was still being written, it was still in the beta phases... So there were a lot o... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So it's interesting that you said that it was easy to get involved in and easy to contribute to. That sounds like a fun place for starters. Can you tell a little bit more about this for people who want to get involved and are not sure how to start, what to start, what makes starting easy...? |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Yeah, sure. So there are a lot of sides that can be looked at... And the architecture of Caddy is engineered well enough that if you're looking at a certain handler, for example, most likely you don't need to look anywhere else besides that particular package, or one or two files that you need... |
If you wanna work on the CLI, it's there. If you wanna work on the config loading and reloading, and the config structure itself, the configuration files - it's all there. If you wanna write a handler that simplifies the lives of a particular process on the web server, you can look at some of those. There's a ton of th... |
And you'll always -- it's the nature of projects; there's a fractal nature. There's so many things that yo can work on, and you will always find something that's either a good first issue, or something that requires more depth and knowledge about the project itself, its architecture, or the Go runtime; if you wanna loo... |
\[12:13\] For example, one of the first things I worked on was basically looking at the warnings or the messages golint was giving (golint CI). It was basically saying "Change the order of these fields and that struct to make it more compact", and stuff like that. |
So it was easy to get into the project and learn more about it as I worked on it more and more, picking up stuff like that. |
I think there's still some low-hanging fruit for other beginners or fresh contributors wanna look at. You can basically fire up the project on VS Code and run the linter, or any of the available linters, whether it's Golang CI Lint, or whatever, and find some areas to fix. And we have a few in the issue list that can b... |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah. I might also jump in and say you can learn a lot from hacking on Caddy, but it might not be the best project for absolute beginners, if you're absolutely new to Go, or absolutely new to open source... Just because its sheer size - there's a lot of packages and different pieces. So it might be a lit... |
Mohammed from the beginning has been awesome about optimizations and little nuanced things that I had never thought to figure out. So that was really cool. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Is it complicated to write such an extension? How much time would you say such a project will take? Or it depends if the extension would be complicated, or simple... |
**Matt Holt:** I guess Mohammed can answer, too. He's probably written more third-party extensions than I have. But I think it depends. If it's a simple extension, some extensions are just a couple lines of code. Others are thousands of lines. It just depends on what they do. I managed in Mohammed's SSH server. I think... |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Well, the two years is because my time is divided between work, school and this side project, plus my personal life... And this is why it took such a stretch. It shouldn't have taken two years, honestly. |
**Jon Calhoun:** So when you're talking about these extensions, I assume with Caddy - based on my knowledge of it - it's a server where you started out and you provided a config file, and it sets up a server in some way based on that... So whether it's grabbing a certificate for your domain and reverse-proxying it to s... |
**Matt Holt:** So at its core, all Caddy knows how to do is - there's like four keys in its config. There's admin, logs, storage, and apps. And all it knows how to do is set up admin and logs (logging) so you can see output, and then storage and apps are all modular; they're all extensible. So Caddy expects apps to ful... |
So the HTTP server has a start function and when it's called, that's when it starts its engine, so to speak, and starts serving your site. And then when it's stopped, it shuts down gracefully. So Caddy doesn't know anything about HTTP, really. So that's why I use C now... I don't know if this is clear to the listeners ... |
**Break:** \[16:39\] |
**Jon Calhoun:** Mohammed, if I were to install your Caddy SSH extension and to run it, this would allow me to SSH into the server that's running Caddy, correct? |
**Mohammed S. Al Sahaf:** Yeah, exactly. |
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