Deep dives into CS topics that complement the book.
A couple of weeks ago I was whinging about Claude Code performance and someone responded that Claude Code runs a VM. That surprised me, so I dug into the leaked source code. It turns out that Claude Code doesn't actually run a VM, but it does do lots of interesting things.
The CAP theorem's 'pick any two' framing is wrong twice. Use interactive visualisations to see how linearizability, causal consistency, and eventual consistency behave during a network partition.
The second edition of The Computer Science Book is now out in ebook, paperback and hardback! There are three new chapters on machine learning, deep learning and LLMs & AI. Existing chapters are revised and expanded. 75% extra content for the same price.
Why you should focus on the data you uniquely own
You're behind NAT. Your colleague is behind NAT. Neither has a public IP. So how does video data flow directly between you? A pugilistic account of STUN, hole punching, and a clever fallback called TURN.
Press a key and your CPU jumps to attention. It saves everything it was doing, handles your keypress, then resumes exactly where it left off. This is how hardware demands attention.
API stands for Application Programming Interface, but the useful idea is deeper: an API is the public interface one piece of software offers another.
DNS is the Internet's naming system. Here's how domain names map to IP addresses, how the namespace is structured, and how lookups work.
TCP gives the Internet a reliable byte stream, but its guarantees have edges. Here's what TCP does, how delivery works, and where it stops.
UDP is the no-frills transport protocol. Here's what it does, how ports work, why it is fast, and when applications use it instead of TCP.