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What Developers Should Know About Networks — Carl Tashian

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The IEEE specification for Ethernet is over 4,000 pages long. It gets into incredibly boring minutiae: design specifications for coaxial trunk cable connectors, compliance interconnect magnitude response curves, link aggregation TLV usage rules, etc. My goal here is to omit 99.9% of those details and go for the juicy 0.1% that are relevant to anyone who wants to have a mental model of networking. If you work on any sort of networked application, my hope is that a rough model will help you feel more comfortable with what is happening further downstack. I love computer networking. It has loads of real-world cost/benefit tradeoffs, abstractions and designs that have stood the test of time and scale, funny workarounds that got layered on top, and a rich and fascinating history that spans computer science, electrical engineering, telecommunications, information theory, and physics. And it all comes together into something magical. We talk to people across the world instantaneously. Data fli

Various line coding schemes. Illustration by Siobhán K Cronin The IEEE specification for Ethernet is over 4,000 pages long. It gets into incredibly boring minutiae: design specifications for coaxial trunk cable connectors, compliance interconnect magnitude response curves, link aggregation TLV usage rules, etc. My goal here is to omit 99.9% of those details and go for the juicy 0.1% that are relevant to anyone who wants to have a mental model of networking. If you work on any sort of networked application, my hope is that a rough model will help you feel more comfortable with what is happening

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