How It Works
Interactive, step-by-step guides that break down complex systems into simple, visual explanations. No jargon, just clarity.
How the Internet Actually Works
The end-to-end journey of data — from undersea cables to browser rendering.
How DNS Works
Step-by-step journey through DNS resolution — from URL to IP address.
How HTTPS Works
TLS 1.3 handshake, certificates, and encrypted communication.
How TCP vs UDP Works
Reliability vs speed — handshakes, ACKs, and when to use each.
How Load Balancing Works
Round robin, least connections, health checks, and failover.
How CDN & Caching Works
Edge servers, cache invalidation, and content delivery.
How NAT & Firewalls Work
Network address translation and packet filtering.
How BGP Routing Works
How the internet finds paths between networks.
VPC Networking
Cloud networking, subnets, and security groups.
How OAuth 2.0 Works
Authorization code flow, PKCE, and token exchange.
How OpenID Connect Works
ID tokens and user identity on top of OAuth.
Kubernetes Pod Creation
From kubectl apply to a running container.
K8s Networking
Services, Ingress, and CNI plugins explained.
Container Internals
Namespaces, cgroups, and image layers.
How Autoscaling Works
HPA, VPA, metrics, and cooldown periods.
API Gateway
Request routing, rate limiting, authentication.
Reverse Proxy
Load balancing, SSL termination, caching.
Service Discovery
Service registries, dynamic IPs, and heartbeats.
Graph & Routing (The "Uber" Algorithms)
Dijkstra vs A* (A-Star) visualized. How Maps finds the shortest route.
Max-Flow Min-Cut
Calculate network capacity bottlenecks visually. Ford-Fulkerson.
Hash Tables (Maps)
O(1) lookups visualized. Hashing, collisions, and chaining.
The Write-Ahead Log (WAL)
Append-only logs, sequential I/O, and crash recovery.
Database Transactions
ACID properties, 2PC, and Saga patterns.
Database Indexing
B-Trees, full table scans, and query plans.
How Redis Works
Data structures, persistence, clustering, and essential patterns.
Caching Strategies
Cache-aside, write-through, TTL, invalidation.
Distributed IDs
Snowflake, UUID, and global unique identifiers.
How Go Channels Work
Goroutines, buffered/unbuffered, select statement.
Memory Allocation
Stack vs heap, virtual memory, page faults.
Garbage Collection
Mark-and-sweep, generational GC, STW pauses.
Event Loops
Node.js async model and non-blocking I/O.
Thread Pools
Worker threads, task queues, and concurrency.
Ring Buffer
Circular queues, head/tail pointers, and zero-allocation streaming.
How Kafka Works
Topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, and delivery guarantees.
WebSockets
Bidirectional real-time connections.
Realtime Comparison
WebSockets vs SSE vs Long Polling.
Message Queues
Pub/sub, at-least-once, dead letter queues.
How Git Works
Objects, refs, merge vs rebase internals.