How the Web Works
The infrastructure under every page load. DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP versions, CDNs, and browser architecture -- the knowledge that separates engineers who guess from engineers who know.
The invisible lookup that turns every domain name into an IP address before a single byte of your page loads. Recursive resolvers, caching layers, and why DNS is the silent performance killer.
The handshake rituals your browser performs before a single byte of data flows. SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK, TLS 1.3's 1-RTT speed boost, slow start, and why these matter for every page load.
The protocol that powered the web for 20 years and the clever hacks developers invented to work around its fundamental bottleneck: head-of-line blocking.
How HTTP/2 solved HTTP/1.1's head-of-line blocking with binary framing, stream multiplexing, and header compression. The protocol that made domain sharding obsolete.
The protocol built from scratch on UDP to kill TCP's last head-of-line blocking problem. QUIC's independent streams, built-in encryption, connection migration, and what it means for web performance.
How CDNs put your content milliseconds from every user on Earth. PoPs, cache-control headers, invalidation strategies, and edge computing for frontend engineers.
When HTTP's request-response model isn't enough. WebSocket's bidirectional channels, SSE's elegant simplicity, and when to use each for real-time features.
What actually runs inside Chrome when you open a tab. Browser process, renderer process, GPU process, site isolation, and why the main thread is the performance bottleneck you keep fighting.
The physics you can't optimize away. Why latency matters more than bandwidth for web performance, how the speed of light sets a hard floor, and practical strategies to fight distance.
10 questions tracing a full HTTP request from URL bar to rendered page. Test your understanding of DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP/2, caching, browser architecture, and latency.