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Jacob
Jacob

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[ANN]: HTTP.jl 1.0 Release!

I recently shared some exciting personal news about joining RelationalAI full-time as a Julia Ecosystem Engineer.

In short, it's been a blast! "Going to work" (i.e. walking from one room into my home office) and getting to tackle my lengthy open-source TODO list has been extremely satisfying.

At the top of my priority list, even before joining RAI, was pushing HTTP.jl toward a much-needed 1.0 release. After enjoying a few years as the "modern" web stack package, HTTP.jl fell a bit by the wayside as many of us who previously put a lot of work into it were pulled away on other priorities. And the nature of many web issues can be pretty intimidating for open-source maintainers trying to chip in here and there on nights and weekends. It puttered along, with a growing list of "highly recommended" updates, but very few resources to tackle them. About 9 months ago, I finally wrapped up a few other open source projects and decided to start tackling HTTP.jl in earnest. And woo-doggy has it been a ride. In addition to some just plain outdated APIs that needed updating, there had been a few rounds of suspect "contributions" that essentially amounted to hacky work-arounds of these outdated APIs that people needed for one-off projects. And then there were the "termites". Those kind of fly-by issues, "Hey, I'm seeing this intermittent failure every once in a while in production", that may seem on the surface like something trivial, but once you manage to peek under the hood, or finally get a stacktrace with some meat on it, it reveals some very glaring underlying architecture problems. Those can be the nastiest, in my experience, because sometimes the answer is to completely overhaul large portions of the codebase, and sometimes, it's a a fix where the comments explaining the change are several times longer than the actual code change.

But wow does it feel great to hit this big milestone, including some ~90 issues closed, and ~40 PRs merged.

Go checkout the discourse announcement, the overhauled documentation, the migration guide for 1.0, or come come chat with us on the public #web Slack channel.

Here's to a brighter web future in Julia!

Top comments (2)

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Mattias Villani • Edited

Congratulations on this important milestone! I am so impressed by people like you who actually sit down and do the work for these sort of things. It is way easier to start a new package on some cool thing than to go those extra miles to clean up, modify, fix and complete older projects. True heros of open source.

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Logan Kilpatrick

Amazing work! So glad to see another important Julia package hit the 1.0 milestone.