[Jodavaho.io] — Josh Vander Hook

I found out today that Daniel Stenberg the guy behind curl, which is the library behind basically every web-enabled tool you use, was nominated developer of the year in Sweden. Now, honestly, this guy works hard, and curl represents the premier F/OSS experience. It’s free, ubiquitous, actively maintained, and essentially vital infrastructure.

So, here’s a story about how he called my code bad.

Christmas eve, 2021, I had a little time off and was enjoying some casual coding. I’ve always loved C over C++, which at the time was my “day job” language.

So there I was nestled in, waiting for dinner finish, likely over at my family’s house listening to the siblings, nephews, etc bicker and play.

I was working my way through the curl book. I even found and submitted a teeny tiny fix! (github link)

My usual way to learn from docs is to “paraphrase” the code examples, re-developing them by hand rather than copy-pasting them.

So, I had done that, but was constantly finding a segfault. In some OSS projects, questions are sometimes welcome on github. It being Christmas eve, I figured I would try to formulate a well-structured question and check in after a few days.

Of course, nearly immediately, two curl maintainers, including Daniel Stenberg himself, pointed out my dumb mistake. You can read for yourself, or see this reply:

I’m not proud - that was bad code. But, it happens to us all, and C++ poisons your respect for api types with implicit type coercion, which is why I try to work only in C or Rust, but that is a conversation for another day.