How SSL actually works
SSL is now TLS, and encryption is the smaller half of the job. What the handshake really does, what a certificate proves, and how teams break it in production.
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The concepts you were
supposed to already know
Concepts that get used without ever being taught. Built up one piece at a time, with diagrams that show the mechanism instead of describing it.
How these are written
No assumed knowledge
Every article says up front what it expects you to know. If a term is unavoidable, it is defined the first time it appears, inline, rather than in a glossary you have to go find.
Starts with something you can see
Every article opens on a concrete fact you could go and check, not a definition. The mental model comes first, the terminology comes after it is useful.
Something to do, not just read
Most articles end with a two-minute exercise you can run in a terminal or a browser tab. Reading about a concept and seeing it happen are different things.
Latest
All articles →What a CDN actually does
A CDN is not magic and it is not only caching. The mental model, the request lifecycle, the headers that control it, and the four ways teams break it.
What should we decode next?
If there is a concept you want explained properly, tell us. Requests genuinely drive what gets written.