DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, load balancers, CDNs — you use this stack every day. This course builds the mental model that makes you dangerous: why requests fail, where latency hides, and how the infrastructure around your code actually behaves.
This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on networking you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.
This course is built by engineers who debug network issues in production systems. It skips the textbook OSI layer memorization and focuses on the concepts that actually explain the failures you see in real deployments.
Each concept comes with commands you can run right now — dig, curl, traceroute, tcpdump, Wireshark captures — to see the protocol in action on real traffic.
Instead of re-explaining TCP with diagrams, this course links to the RFCs, the Cloudflare blog posts, and the Beej's Guide chapters that are already the definitive references.
Each day is one focused topic. You can do it over lunch. No labs to install, no VMs to configure. Just read, run a command or two, and understand something new about the network around your code.
Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.
The recursive resolver, authoritative nameservers, TTLs, and why cached DNS breaks your deploys. dig, nslookup, and how CDNs hijack DNS to route you to the nearest edge server.
Status codes, headers, keep-alive connections, HTTP/2 multiplexing, and the TLS handshake. Why HTTPS is faster than HTTP. How to read a curl -v dump and understand every line.
The three-way handshake, sequence numbers, window scaling, and how TCP manages congestion. Why UDP exists. How to read a Wireshark capture and spot a retransmit.
Layer 4 vs Layer 7 load balancing, round-robin vs least-connections vs IP hash, sticky sessions, health checks, and how reverse proxies like nginx and Caddy sit in front of your app.
How CDNs cache at the edge, cache invalidation, and why your deploys need cache-busting. WebSocket upgrades, long-poll vs SSE, and a systematic debugging checklist for the 15 most common network errors.
Instead of shooting our own videos, we link to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.
Foundational explainers on what actually happens between your browser and a server — covering DNS, HTTP, and TCP in plain terms.
Visual walkthroughs of the DNS resolution chain, caching, DNSSEC, and how large-scale CDNs use anycast routing.
Live packet captures showing the three-way handshake, retransmits, window scaling, and the difference between TCP and UDP traffic.
Configure nginx to proxy, load-balance, and TLS-terminate a backend service. The practical setup every full-stack developer needs to know.
Cloudflare and Fastly engineers explain edge caching, anycast, cache invalidation strategy, and how to configure cache-control headers correctly.
Multiplexing, QUIC, header compression, and why HTTP/3 over UDP solves the head-of-line blocking problem that plagued HTTP/2.
The best way to deepen understanding is to read the canonical open-source implementations. Clone them, trace the code, understand how the concepts in this course get applied in production.
Curated networking resources and exercises built specifically for software developers, not network engineers.
The canonical introductory text on BSD socket programming. Read the source to understand how TCP connections are actually opened and closed in code.
Build a toy DNS resolver from scratch in Python. The fastest way to truly understand the DNS resolution chain.
Intercept, inspect, and modify HTTP/HTTPS traffic. The best hands-on tool for understanding what browsers and apps actually send over the wire.
Your services talk to databases, queues, and external APIs over the network every second. Understanding TCP, DNS, and load balancers lets you debug the 3 AM failures faster.
Latency, CORS errors, and caching bugs have network causes. This course gives you the vocabulary to actually read the Network tab and understand what you're seeing.
System design questions at senior levels always involve networking fundamentals. Load balancers, CDNs, and DNS come up constantly. This course covers exactly what you need.
The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers AI engineering in depth — hands-on, with practitioners who build AI systems for a living. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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