john gladkih

20+ billion installations across earth and Mars. Built by one Swedish guy. Alone. In 1996. 🤯 Meet Daniel Stenberg 🇸🇪 > Born 1970 in Huddinge, Sweden. Self-taught on a Commodore 64. No CS degree. > In 1996, started building a tiny tool to download files from the internet. > Called it cURL ~ today the silent backbone of every app, website, and connected device. > Worked on it alone in his spare time. For free. > Nearly 30 years later, cURL runs on 20+ billion installations worldwide. > Every iPhone. Every Android. Every PlayStation. Every Tesla. > Powers Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram behind the scenes. > NASA used cURL on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. 🚀 > His code literally flew on another planet. > Companies worth trillions used his code. He answered bug reports for free. > Made $0 from cURL for the first 23 years. > In 2017, the King of Sweden personally handed him the Polhem Prize ~ Sweden's oldest tech award. > First time ever given to an open-source project. > 2019 ~ finally joined wolfSSL to work on cURL full-time. 🔥 > In 2025, awarded the IVA Gold Medal by the Royal Swedish Academy. > Still ships from his home office in Stockholm. Still answers GitHub issues himself. He spent nearly 30 years writing code that runs the internet from the background. He made nothing for 23 of them. He kept going anyway. What a man. Open-source GOAT. 🐐