I realized recently I've never blogged about the best tech talk I've ever given and one of my favorite performances: "HTTP Can Do That?!: A collection of bad ideas" from PyCon US 2016 in Portland, Oregon. If you have ever written any code that interacts with the web, you'll understand this, and maybe get a kick out of it.

Learn how to get more performance, testability, and flexibility out of your web apps, using features already built into HTTP. I walk you through case studies exploring good (and bad) ideas, using Python, your browser, netcat, and other common tools.

[Slides, sample code.]

I discuss:

• the structure of requests and responses
• verbs/methods (including underused ones such as HEAD)
• an example API that responds to POST but not GET
• content types
• status codes (including 451 as an Easter egg)
• headers
• the weird case of From:
• the Host header and how it's used in malformed requests that try to trick a site admin into clicking spam links in server 404 logs
• making your own headers like X-Wikimedia-Debug
• very odd status codes and reason-phrases found in the wild
• and ideas for further exploration

I've tagged this entry "Comedy" because it's pretty funny (the YouTube comments include people arguing over my "corny" humor!), and if you like that playfulness, lemme point you to the conference !!Con and the Recurse Center, because those are contexts within which I've thoroughly enjoyed and explored playfulness around programming.

Special shout-out to Leonard's book Restful Web APIs and its appendices A and B, the status and header codices. Living with Leonard as he became a mega HTTP and REST expert definitely influenced this talk.

I'd initially presented this talk the previous year at the late Open Source Bridge, but the PyCon recording has (as I recall) a better performance plus more laughter from the audience. And the PyCon captioner and I ended up bantering through the medium of the captions: