Basics
10 posts
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MTU 1500: Why the internet has a 'max speed'
Why is every packet on the internet 1500 bytes long? A look at Maximum Transmission Units and why your fiber connection still uses 1980s limits.
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IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS: The Pizza as a Service Analogy
AWS, Heroku, Gmail—what's the difference? Understanding cloud service models through the lens of pizza.
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Base64 is Not Encryption: Stop Hiding Secrets in Plain Sight
Just because you can't read it doesn't mean it's secret. A guide to what encoding actually is and why Base64 is like writing in a different font.
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Public Key vs Private Key: The Locked Box Analogy
How do we send secret messages over the public internet? A simple guide to asymmetric encryption without the math.
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How Does a Cookie Actually Work?
Why do websites keep me logged in? A guide to HTTP cookies and how they solve the problem of "statelessness."
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ASCII vs UTF-8: Why Emojis Break Things
Why is my string length wrong? A guide to character encoding and how we went from 127 characters to over 140,000.
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Concurrency vs Parallelism: A Coffee Shop Guide
Are you doing many things at once, or just dealing with many things at once? The subtle but important difference between concurrency and parallelism.
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Latency vs Throughput: The Plumbing Analogy
Why your "fast" internet can still feel laggy. Understanding the difference between how much data you can send and how fast it gets there.
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Megabit (Mbps) vs Megabyte (MB/s): Why your internet feels 'slow'
Ever wonder why your 100 Mbps internet only downloads at 12 MB/s? It's not a scam—it's just different units.
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Kibibyte (KiB) vs Kilobyte (KB): What's the Real Difference?
A simple guide to understanding why Kibibyte and Kilobyte aren't the same thing — and why it matters in computing today.