I think a lot about a conversation I had with Daniel Sterberg, the creator and maintainer of curl a couple years back while at working at Postman. During our acquisition of all desirable talent possible for the Postman Open Technologies phase I had pinged Daniel for a conversation. He kindly accepted and shared his back story as well as his vision for curl. We talked about HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2 and the push for HTTP/3. Then we talked about Postman and APIs. He was so gloriously uninterested in APIs, and so honest and confident in the URL–I never even tried to hire him. No way. I just enjoyed learning from him, but I think about this conversation at least once a month.
One of my favorite things about technology is how whatever you are working on can be rendered laughable in the face of fundamental standards and the solid tooling built on top of them. There is a lot of puff to the tech sector, with APIs leading the way. I admit it. It is one of the things I love about the world of APIs. However, I am also humbled by Daniel’s view of things, and find myself moving towards his world view as I get older. Except for the fact I am all wrapped up in my identity being hitched to the API wagon. I envy how 1998 curl is, and how it has resisted for a quarter centruy. I love how uninterested Daniel was in APIs—everything he needed was available on the protocol stack curl uses. It is his truth. It is his world view.
I think about this conversation monthly to remind me of how fabricated the API realm is. The API space is vendor defined, and like the rest of the tech sector, we are just building on the same protocols and standards curl does-—we just aren’t as honest about it. Heck, we aren’t always aware of it or care. Anyways, just a random blog post. It is an evergreen conversation I use to center me, so maybe it can help center someone else out there. I still think there is a special kind of nuance and art to API that doesn’t exist with curl, but I think API is way more theater and a religion, where curl is an industrial-grade utility and tool. The usefulness and timelessness of curl helps bring more clarity to what is happening in the API industry, helping separate the hype and trends from what will actually be around in 10, 20, 50 years.
P.S. I am aware that curl and APIs is mot a fair comparison, but it still allows me to see things in a different light.
