Overview

We are entering an era in software engineering where we rely on libraries and frameworks to do most of our work. While this is useful and save tremendous dev hours, it creates leaky abstractions that manifest in form of performance degradation, unexpected errors, 100% CPU , network and disk usage, hangs, latency and many other. It becomes difficult to articulate what goes wrong on the backend and how to fix it when engineers don't understand the basic building block of what they are interacting with.

Network communication is one of the most critical pieces in backend engineering. And the TCP/IP Internet suite is the basic fundemntal building block of communications that link the frontend to the backend. Any protocol we use eventually gets encapsulated into either a TCP segment or UDP datagram. That packet is wrapped in an IP packet which is placed into a frame and then sent across the network. These layers are important to understand for backend engineers in order to optimize the stack, minimize latency, and increase throughput. What matters  is the true understanding of these pieces and not just memorizing definitions and packet headers to pass an exam. If an engineer truly understood what is happening when their backend API receives an HTTP POST request for example, they will be astonished at how much is happening behind the scenes. They would completely change the way they approach backend API designs, they will try to select the best protocol for the job, and they will tune that protocol to its maximum potential. They will start asking questions about frameworks and libraries that nobody else does. It is those questions that will make them fully utilize those framework to their maximum potential.

Requirements

• 1. Basic programming experience
• 2. Recommended: Having built a backend application

Outcomes

• 1. IP Protocol
• 2. UDP Protocol
• 3. TCP Protocol
• 4. Understand the circumstances where requests and responses are slowed down
• 5. Learn how DNS works
• 6. Learn how TLS works