Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
HTTP Can Do That?! and Comedy
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
On Wednesday of next week (June 24th) I'm presenting "HTTP Can Do That?!" at Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon.
I have explored weird corners of HTTP -- malformed requests that try to trick a site admin into clicking spam links in 404 logs, an API that responds to POST but not GET, and more. In this talk I'll walk you through those (using Python, netcat, and other tools you might have lying around the house).
I practiced this talk Tuesday night at the Recurse Center and it went well; people learned a lot about headers, verbs, status codes, and odd HTTP loopholes, and gave me constructive criticism so next week's version will be clearer.
I have also suggested a Birds of a Feather evening session called "Nothing Is Totally Incomprehensible If We Try Together" but don't yet know whether or when it will happen.
Then, at AlterConf Portland on Saturday, June 27th, I'll be performing some stand-up comedy for hippie nerds. I thought about trying to cram 100 punchlines into my 45-minute HTTP talk, but I don't think I'll be able to achieve that -- people need to understand something before they can understand a joke about it -- so it'll be nice to get 4 or 5 laughs per minute during the stand-up on Saturday.
