QCon San Francisco 2021 November 1-5, 2021 | | Solving HTTP Problems With Code and Protocols

What You’ll Learn

Understand why we are where we at with internet protocols and where we are going.
How to leverage abstraction both going up and down.

Abstract

The networks which carry websites and app content is constantly changing; and not many of us know how. In the last few years most of our content has moved to being provided over HTTP, but in doing this internet engineers found out that HTTP is too old and clunky for today’s internet content. This talk will go through the issues in HTTP, how HTTP2 was developed using Google’s SPDY experiment, and how QUIC will change everything.

Question:

What do you do day-to-day?

Answer:

I run a team of developers that deploy a bunch of Web sites. I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from Internet and Web standards and applying a lot of those practices in this current team quite a bit as well which is good because when you're in a very informative role you tend to be a bit like a pop scientist. You understand how that stuff works. You don't know how to build. And so I come back to understanding how to build so that the skills keep going up.

Question:

What is your motivation for this talk?

Answer:

This talk is going to help people understand a little bit of history of HTTP how it got to where it got to why it never changed for so many years and how it's evolved to HTTP2 and then how it's going to evolve further from that.

Question:

Who should come to your talk?

Answer:

Developers and some which may have some sysadmin knowledge. Pop scientists for protocols; they understand how abstractions work.

Question:

What can people take away from this talk?

Answer:

This is the BBC documentary style of what has happened and what's going to happen and why you need to pay attention to it.

Question:

What keeps you up at night?

Answer:

The thing which does keep me up at night is the policy in tech argument. QUIC is going to be the first protocol in mass use that has encryption baked in. So it's not added on; it's not HTTP and HTTPS, it's encryption baked into the protocol. The the IAB are encouraging all IETF groups right now to standardize protocols with encryption baked in mostly as an answer to what happened with NSA and pervasive monitoring.

Speaker: Natasha Rooney

W3C Advisory Board, Stack Evolution Board IETA, & Engineering Director @GSMA

Natasha has been both a web and application developer before becoming Director of Internet Engineering providing expertise on web technologies and internet protocols to the telecoms industry. She attends W3C and IETF working with both standards bodies to support and make recommendations for better user experiences on mobile and across the mobile network. She is a member of the W3C Advisory Board and the Stack Evolution Group at IETF. She is currently obsessed with TCP congestion control techniques, Japanese video games, and runs her own YouTube channel on travel particularly across Japan.