Deps: What did I just install? on PärPod

curl: Twenty-Eight Years from a Swedish Suburb

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Most Installed Software You Have Never Thought About

This is episode five of What Did I Just Install.

There is a piece of software running on more than twenty billion devices right now. It is in your phone. It is in your car. It is in your television and your game console and your printer and your router. It is in the thermostat on your wall, the set-top box under your television, and the laptop you are using right now. It runs on over a hundred operating systems across twenty-eight processor architectures. NASA uses it, though when pressed for details, the only answer they gave was, and I quote, “We are using curl to support NASA’s mission and vision.” Which is the kind of non-answer that tells you the real answer is probably classified.

FastAPI: The Three-Body Framework

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Trinity You Never Chose

This is episode twelve of What Did I Just Install.

If you write Python and your code talks to the internet, there is a very good chance FastAPI is somewhere in your stack. Startups use it for their first API prototype. Data teams use it to serve machine learning models. Hobby projects use it for home automation dashboards, booking systems, notification gateways, and quick internal tools. A survey of Python developers in twenty twenty-four found that FastAPI had overtaken Flask as the most popular Python web framework for new projects. And every single one of those projects starts the same way. Import FastAPI, create an app, decorate a function, return some data. Three lines of code to have an API endpoint running on your laptop.

ffmpeg: The Invisible Empire

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Thing You Cannot See

On February eighteenth, twenty twenty one, a six-wheeled robot named Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater on Mars. Over the following months, it began sending back images and video of an alien landscape, rust-colored plains under a butterscotch sky. Every frame of that footage was reportedly compressed before transmission by a piece of software called ffmpeg.

This is episode eight of What Did I Just Install.

left-pad: Eleven Lines

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two Thirty on a Tuesday

This is episode one of What Did I Just Install.

On a Tuesday afternoon in March twenty sixteen, deployment pipelines at Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify failed within minutes of each other. Not one of them had pushed a code change. The errors were identical. A four oh four. A missing package, something called left-pad that none of these companies had ever directly installed but that thousands of their indirect dependencies pointed to. Within ten minutes, the failures were cascading across the JavaScript ecosystem. React would not build. Babel would not compile. If your company used JavaScript in any serious capacity, something in your stack had just quietly broken.

OpenSSL: The Lock on Every Door

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Heartbeat That Bled

This is episode fourteen of What Did I Just Install.

On the seventh of April, two thousand fourteen, a Monday morning, system administrators around the world opened their email to find something that had never existed before. A security vulnerability with a name. A logo. A website. And the kind of message that makes your stomach drop.

The vulnerability was called Heartbleed. The logo was a bleeding heart, drawn in red against white, the kind of clean design you would normally associate with a startup launch, not a catastrophe. The website, heartbleed dot com, explained in simple language that a bug in a piece of software called OpenSSL had been silently exposing the private memory of approximately seventeen percent of the internet’s secure web servers. Passwords, session tokens, credit card numbers, private encryption keys. All of it, leaking, up to sixty-four kilobytes at a time, to anyone who knew how to ask.

pip install: The Invention of Trust

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Two-Word Spell

This is episode ten of What Did I Just Install.

You type two words. pip install. And in the time it takes to draw a breath, code written by a stranger in another country is downloading, unpacking, and executing on your machine. You did not read it. You do not know who wrote it. You have no idea what it does beyond what the name on the box suggests. And you do this dozens of times a week without a second thought.

sqlite: The File That Ate the World

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

One Trillion Databases

This is episode six of What Did I Just Install.

There is a database running on your phone right now. Not one database. Hundreds. Your text messages sit in a SQLite database. Your photos, your contacts, your browser history, your music library, your health data. Every app you have ever installed almost certainly created at least one. If you are listening to this on an iPhone, the podcast app itself is using SQLite to track your subscriptions, your play position, your download queue. If you are on Android, it is the same story, just a different operating system doing the same thing.