World Congress 2023 • Sep 27, 2023

Brewing Tea over the Internet

Imran Nazar

To mock HTTP's chaotic architectural bloat, engineers drafted a joke protocol for brewing coffee. Discover the hilarious history and real networking lessons behind the "418 I'm a teapot" error.

Pause

Mute

Enter Fullscreen

#1 about 3 min

The history and evolution of early HTTP drafts

The initial text-based HTTP protocol lacked paths and error codes.

#2 about 3 min

Standardizing the HTTP protocol and adding response headers

New verbs, paths, and status codes transformed HTTP into a programmatic protocol.

#3 about 4 min

Reusing email software standards for HTTP file uploads

The inclusion of email MIME types enabled multipart form data and file attachments over HTTP.

#4 about 4 min

The coffee pot control protocol and brew verb

An April Fools internet standard formalized ridiculous extensions to HTTP network requests.

#5 about 2 min

The origin of the HTTP 418 teapot error

The introduction of the teapot error code became a beloved engineering community joke.

#6 about 2 min

Extending the coffee protocol for tea appliance hardware

The coffee protocol was eventually modified to support tea brewing with selection and rejection codes.

#7 about 2 min

REST principles and inappropriate HTTP response status codes

Using document verbs for database rows contrasts with returning success codes for internal errors.

#8 about 3 min

Reviewing other humorous internet engineering standard network RFCs

Joke standards mock concepts like firewall intention checking and extreme physical packet transport.

#9 about 2 min

Physical hardware implementations of the coffee appliance protocol

Hackathon projects have successfully built working appliances driven by the humorous protocol.

#10 about 3 min

Audience questions on avian carriers and binary HTTP

Discussions explore carrier pigeon packet loss mechanics and binary protocol formats.

Matching moments

2:59 min

Representational state transfer and the adoption of HTTP verbs

James Seconde · World Congress 2023

35 sec

Core principles of the REST architectural style

Shweta Palande · LIVE

1:42 min

Questions on HTTP QUERY and AI standard timelines

Christian Liebel

Christian Liebel · World Congress 2026 Europe

6:30 min

Deprecating old email protocols and preserving niche online communities

Chris Heilmann +2 · LIVE

2:55 min

Historical evolution from remote procedure calls to modern protocols

Alexis Yushin

Alexis Yushin · World Congress 2024

3:04 min

Supporting modern network protocols in foundational libraries

Daniel Stenberg · Coffee With Developers

More from World Congress 2023

The year 3000, a brief history of Web Development thumbnail

over 2 years ago

The year 3000, a brief history of Web Development

Lorenzo Pieri

Demografie nutzen um jedem Bewerber das passende Angebot zu machen! thumbnail

over 2 years ago

Demografie nutzen um jedem Bewerber das passende Angebot zu machen!

Nathalie Gierth

Guided Memory Management: Rust's Ownership Model thumbnail

almost 3 years ago

Guided Memory Management: Rust's Ownership Model

Stefan Baumgartner

Passwordless future: WebAuthn and Passkeys in practice thumbnail

almost 3 years ago

Passwordless future: WebAuthn and Passkeys in practice

Clemens Hübner

External Secrets Operator: the secrets management toolbox for self-sufficient teams thumbnail

almost 3 years ago

External Secrets Operator: the secrets management toolbox for self-sufficient teams

Moritz Johner

Building Reliable Serverless Applications with AWS CDK and Testing thumbnail

almost 3 years ago

Building Reliable Serverless Applications with AWS CDK and Testing

Raphael Manke

Upcoming sessions on this topic

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 10:20–10:50

Stage 2

API = Some REST and HTTP, right? RIGHT?!

Rustam Mehmandarov

Passionate computer scientist

Rustam Mehmandarov

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 12:20–12:50

Stage 9

Designing APIs That Survive AI Agents at Scale

Phani Pendurthi

Mastercard, Principal Software Engineer

Phani Pendurthi

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 16:10–16:40

Outdoor Stage

When Humans Stop Writing Code: Rethinking Languages, Compilers, and Responsibility

Simon Auer

Organizer of flutter vienna meetup and CEO of marqably

Simon Auer

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 10:20–10:50

Stage 3

Reading the Mind of Your NGINX Fleet: A Hybrid Rule + ML Pipeline for NGINX Config Intelligence

Brandon LEE

AI Architect Lead at F5

Brandon LEE

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 09:00–09:30

Stage 3

Your Thread Pool Is Lying to You — Sizing Concurrency from Rate Limits and Latency, Not Guesswork

Ratul Ghosh, Sesha Chennupati

Ratul Ghosh

Sesha Chennupati

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 14:55–15:05

Outdoor Stage

In-Person by Default: Principles & Practices for Building Developer Meetups

Steve Chen

Executive Director and Founder at Code & Coffee

Steve Chen

Related videos

Awful APIs: A History Lesson in Industry Mistakes and Mishaps thumbnail

World Congress 2023 • almost 3 years ago

Awful APIs: A History Lesson in Industry Mistakes and Mishaps

James Seconde

The State Of The Web thumbnail

World Congress 2021 • about 5 years ago

The State Of The Web

Jeremy Keith

What’s New in Web? 2026 Edition thumbnail

World Congress 2026 Europe • about 2 months ago

What’s New in Web? 2026 Edition

Christian Liebel

An Opinionated Guide to Bulletproof APIs thumbnail

World Congress 2026 Europe • about 2 months ago

An Opinionated Guide to Bulletproof APIs

Rustam Mehmandarov

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – Guten TAG, Web Standards, AI and more thumbnail

LIVE • 9 months ago

WeAreDevelopers LIVE – Guten TAG, Web Standards, AI and more

Chris Heilmann, Daniel Cranney, Christian Liebel

Rest API Antipatterns thumbnail

World Congress 2026 Europe • about 2 months ago

Rest API Antipatterns

Wekoslav Stefanovski

Related articles

CH

Chris Heilmann

Dev Digest 126 - * yells at cloud

Hello there, during the WeAreDevelopers World Congress last week many people got stranded on their way home because of the CrowdStrike debacle. But all worked out and we will be back 2025! Tickets ...

about 2 years ago

Dev Digest 126 - * yells at cloud

CH

Chris Heilmann

Dev Digest 139 - Soft and hard queries

News and ArticlesLet's start with Amelia Wattenberger's excellent essay Bridging the hard and the soft talking about humans and data. Do you sometimes also miss aspects of the early web like a lack...

almost 2 years ago

Dev Digest 139 - Soft and hard queries

Dev Digest 128 - Do not Google Monopoly

Hello fellow developer, who watches the watchmen and what is a monopoly? Well, let's find out and learn a few things about new web features and accessibility along the way.News and ArticlesIt is of...

about 2 years ago

Dev Digest 128 - Do not Google Monopoly

Dev Digest 123 - Easy as A, B, C1

Hello there, lots to talk about in terms of security and things in the AI world. And the WeAreDevelopers World Congress is very, very soon, so we're busy planning CODE100 and finding moderators - a...

about 2 years ago

Dev Digest 123 - Easy as A, B, C1

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Senior Engineer, Infrastructure Platform

Expert Remote Code Review Cloud Computing Software Security

about 1 month ago

Technical Support Engineer 2

Indianapolis, IN, United States

Experienced Remote CURL Twilio Snowflake

Forward Deployed Software Engineer

Greater London, UK

Remote Alwayson Restful APIs Bioinformatics

about 1 month ago

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

San Francisco, CA, United States

Expert Remote Ruby Restful APIs Virtual Agents

4 days ago • Verified

Principal Software Engineer, Networking

San Francisco, United States

Expert Remote Microservices Cloud (AWS/Google/Azure)

Software Engineer, Fraud

San Francisco, CA, United States

Expert $146k–183k Remote Twilio Code Review Security Software