ASW Episode 233
Violator
Let’s look at another New Wave influence on our appsec world.
Yesterday marked the anniversary of Depeche Mode’s “Violator”, whose track listing sounds like a journey through software development.
Starting with an idea from the “World in My Eyes” to the “Sweetest Perfection” of a design.
Then on to “Enjoy the Silence” – of build warnings, I think. I hope the line, “words are very unnecessary” doesn’t refer to documentation.
And ending with a deploy to prod that’s “Clean”.
I just can’t get enough.
Like episode 231, I went deep on a single album again. There’s a wealth of New Wave bands to draw from and I try to avoid too many repeats, but Depeche Mode is always going to get a mention at least once a year.
This episode was also a celebration of Curl’s 25th anniversary. And in ASW style I celebrated with a limerick:
This one time when my browser did die
I thought, “Why not give libcurl a try?”
I typed dash dash help all
And then watched as a wall
Of 200+ options scrolled by
The first official version of Curl appeared on March 20, 1998. Two weeks later version 4.1 fixed three bugs. Twenty-five years later it’s fixed a several thousand bugs. But that’s just the nature of software development.
Most importantly, libcurl and its command-line counterpart are premier tools present on every operating system and in countless apps. It’s proven to be one of the most successful open source tools.
A lot of that success lays with its maintainer, Daniel Stenberg, who shepherds the C code through thoughtful design and has built a positive community around the project. Almost 3,000 people have contributed code or feedback to the project. All of these are strong indicators of success.
Read more about its releases and its history to find out about its origins in Brazil and why the first release was 4.0.
Congratulations on version 8.0.0! May we see another 25 years of handling protocols.