“I Could Rewrite Curl”

Obviously everyone could rewrite curl*, in 2021, or so they think.

Here's the magic in that trick: we have, collectively, amassed a heap of knowledge on HTTP and its behavior in the wild; this was made possible by curl, in the first place. Once this is handwaved away, of course it's easy to do. "Look at me, [standing on the shoulders of giants,] I have a really great view from up here!"

(*small print: and this is speaking about the happy path, where client, its stack, network, server stack, and server all align perfectly; this happens pretty much never)

People are envious

No, It's combination of Dunning-Kruger effect [0] and "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" effect [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

most people underestimate huge effort under simple to use products but integrated to our lives heavily.

* redis - I can do it, listen socket, serve from hashmap

* uber - how come this app is so huge, I can make it in 2 weekends (google map + api + database)

* cURL - easy, use my fancy library (it already implements HTTP stack) and rewrite it

....

Just a little tangent but I think everyone should know cURL… not postman, not httpie or any other more “friendly” tool. cURL is the standard, pre-installed, do-everything, scriptable tool to interact with web APIs. I could say mostly the same stuff about knowing Bash. It separates the barely effective from hyper-effective individuals on simple day to day (programming) tasks.