Series: The Web Explained (13 Posts)

Hey there! Yeah, you. The [insert non-technical job here] who's got a call tomorrow with an important prospect or perhaps an interview for a new gig. Listen, I know that with each passing day at work, you feel yourself flailing in a sea of alphabet soup, trying to decipher the strange language you keep hearing from the engineering team. You're in Oz, and I'm gonna show you behind the curtain. ‍️ Surf The Seas of Alphabet Soup You may feel like you're drowning, but I'm here to show you

HTML: The Structure of Your House Every website you view in a browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge) is literally served to you as a simple text file. For real. From the smallest of mom-and-pop websites to the largest imaginable infrastructure, the end result at the end of the day is a simple text file delivered to your browser in the language it learned first, HTML , which stands for HyperText Markup Language , and that's only useful to know for trivia night with the guys. Like any of the

Ok, you've decided to keep going onto Level 2 this is where it really starts to get fun and a little closer to the reality for most professional engineering teams in the field. First, let's do a quick thought experiment to get your mind primed for the knowledge bomb currently fixed on your coordinates... Let's Build A House! Close your eyes and imagine that you're building a house. One option is that you can go out into the woods, chop down some trees, saw everything by hand, forging nails one

So far, we've talked exclusively about things that happen in the user's browser. This is all fine and dandy, but suddenly you've realized that your fans (and a literal army of Russian bots) will not be denied their ability to leave you a message on the guestbook page of your website. Thanks to the direct brain infusion of knowledge you've gotten thus far, you feel pretty good about making a page that has a form on it. You can even check to see if it's blank and that it meets your rigorous

Languages: Many options to accomplish similar outcomes. The number of programming languages that exist seems to be anywhere from 700 to 25,000 . There's no way you're going to learn them all, and in reality, there are probably about 50 that are in any sort of wide usage in the wild, so don't waste your time learning some esoteric programming language. This list is not exhaustive, but the reality is that you're likely to run into one of these open-source languages in your travels: Ruby

Server-Side Frameworks It should be no surprise to you that the same inherent laziness desire for efficiency that motivates many front-end programmers to utilize packages and frameworks to speed up application development exists on the backend as well. As you dive deeper and deeper down into the strata that is software development on the web, it becomes more and more like a fractal. You choose a language first, and then you're met with even more choices regarding the ideal framework to use

Databases At its core, a database is just a place to persist data about a user, content for your site, or anything else you need to store for easy retrieval or manipulation. You'll also hear this referred to as a persistence layer . We talked at length about various backend frameworks and covered the various features and strengths of each. One nearly universal feature is that they all come with ways to interact with a database in a more simplified fashion. These layers of database

The last section around backend technologies covered a lot of ground. I hope you've had time to let it soak in like a nice marinade, review your notes, and Tweet about how wrong I am about your favorite thing. I will do my best to keep this section a little tighter and tighter for the sake of your attention span and the impending carpal-tunnel syndrome that writing this collection of articles has placed me into the unholy crosshairs of. Domain Names & DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is

You may rapidly find yourself in a situation where you're going to want to afford some level of security and privacy to your users. You'd like them to be able to log in, manage their account, and choose their favorite cast member from the Mandalorian as a cute profile icon . To do this, we're going to need to lock down certain parts of your application and find some way to assert that random strangers on the internet are who they say they are. Authorization vs. Authentication Simply put

Finally, after what seems like forever, your website or application is out there on the internet. It's built using your favorite front-end and back-end frameworks. It's hosted on an amazingly performant (and cheap!) cloud service, and you've integrated mechanisms for users to log in and access protected content. Wow. You did it. You freakin' did it. Your site grows, the money starts rolling in, and pretty soon, you find yourself asking your development team to push up code each time that you

Over the years, I've been blessed enough to work with a wide variety of organizations, each with its own quirks, culture, and personalities. Unfortunately, one universal thing I've observed (and the driving force behind me writing this series) has been the relative discomfort emanating from non-technical people who are simply trying to find the best way to operate effectively surrounded by a veritable lion's den of critical-minded engineers. I totally get it. And it sucks. At the end of the day

Time. The most precious resource. You probably shouldn't waste it in meetings. I've personally experienced and lamented over our society's complete disrespect for the absolute blessing that is even the smallest increment of time. On an individual level, it should be our most carefully guarded resource. On a company level, its misuse should be analyzed, reported on, and further optimized in the same way that the financial balance sheet is. The hourglass of our lives is very real, and if you let

‍️ Making Stuff: Cake Slices, Tracer Bullets, and Cannonballs. It'll all make sense. Imagine you've got a wedding coming up and are in need of a cake. You head to the bakery to sample some of the various confections, your mouth watering with excitement. The baker comes out and presents you with a tray of dozens of samples, but something seems...off. Rather than tiny slices of delectable goodness, it's just, like, the bottom layer of each one. How in the hell are you supposed to make an