#internet

11 articles

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3: Reinventing the Web's Transport

The verbs and headers of HTTP are the same as 1997, but the transport under them was re-engineered twice. HTTP/2 multiplexes many streams over one TCP connection; HTTP/3 throws out TCP entirely for QUIC over UDP to escape head-of-line blocking.

10 min read·Jul 28, 2026

Networks & the Internet

BGP: How the Internet's Networks Agree on Routes

The internet is a mesh of ~75,000 independently run networks. BGP is how they advertise reachable prefixes to each other and negotiate routes — driven by business policy, not shortest path, and held together by trust.

10 min read·Jul 26, 2026

Networks & the Internet

CDNs: Bringing the Web Closer

A load balancer scales a site in one place, but distance sets a floor on latency that no amount of hardware can beat. CDNs scale geographically — caching content at hundreds of edge locations near users, and steering each request to the closest one.

10 min read·Jul 20, 2026

Networks & the Internet

Email: The Internet's Oldest Application

Email is a distinct application on the internet's plumbing, older than the web. It relays store-and-forward from mail server to mail server via a DNS MX lookup, and by original design never checked who the sender claimed to be — which is why SPF, DKIM, and DMARC exist.

10 min read·Jul 17, 2026

Networks & the Internet

DHCP: How Your Device Joins a Network

How a device with no address at all joins a network: the DORA handshake that leases it an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and DNS server automatically — on a lease that quietly expires.

9 min read·Jul 15, 2026

Networks & the Internet

TLS: Encrypting the Web

Plaintext HTTP let anyone on the path read your passwords. TLS wraps the connection in encryption by using slow asymmetric crypto only to authenticate the server and agree a key, then switching to fast symmetric crypto for the data.

10 min read·Jul 14, 2026

Networks & the Internet

NAT: How Billions Share Four Billion Addresses

There are about four billion possible IPv4 addresses and far more than four billion connected devices — yet everything works. Network Address Translation is the stopgap hiding in every home router that lets a whole network share a single public address, disambiguated by port.

9 min read·Jul 12, 2026

Networks & the Internet

HTTP and the World Wide Web

The web is one application running on top of the internet's plumbing. HTTP is how a browser asks a server for a resource — a stateless request and response that cookies and the Host header quietly extend into logins and shared hosting.

10 min read·Jul 10, 2026

Networks & the Internet

DNS: The Internet's Phone Book

Humans use names; the network routes to numbers. DNS bridges the gap with a distributed, delegated tree — no single machine holds the whole thing, and caching makes it feel instant.

10 min read·Jul 8, 2026

Networks & the Internet

IP Addresses and Routing

IP gives every device an address and lets routers forward packets hop by hop toward it — best-effort, connectionless, and with no single router that knows the whole route.

10 min read·Jul 4, 2026

Networks & the Internet

Packet Switching

Why the internet chops your data into hundreds of independently-routed packets instead of reserving a wire for you, and how that one choice buys both efficiency and resilience.

10 min read·Jul 2, 2026