Whenever I build software or run servers, I end up taking things apart in my head. Here are four questions I wanted answers to—explained simply first, then interactively, and finally down to the code.
What actually happens between pressing Enter in your browser and seeing a page appear.
Every page visit is a round trip: an address lookup, a secure connection, a server running code, and your browser painting the result in under a tenth of a second.
How an atomic clock 20,000 km in space turns into a smooth blue dot on a campus map.
Satellites beam timestamps from space. The vehicle measures time delays to calculate its position, then streams coordinates over cellular data to a map on your phone.
How an ordinary webpage paints moving characters and collisions without stuttering.
A game runs on a 16.6-millisecond loop: read input, update physics, check collisions, clear the canvas, and repaint before the monitor refreshes.
Why traditional tools upload your personal files to their servers—and how we avoid it.
Traditional web tools upload your sensitive documents to remote servers. PDFTools processes files in your browser so your document never leaves your computer's memory.