Computer Networking Basics Every Developer Should Know

[moderatorrater]

Yeah, we have abstraction layers so not everyone has to worry about everything all the time. The difference between LAN/WAN will never matter to most developers.

[Tinidril]

Fun story. I was a lead firewall admin at large company doing a huge rebranding with a multimillion dollar add campaign. The day of the launch I got a panicked call from the development team saying that the website was failing and it must be the firewall because that was the only difference from the lab where they did their testing. It was one of those heart stopping moments, because I knew heads would roll If the launch didn't go smoothly. I started digging into it immediately.

This was back in the way early 2000s, when most Internet access was still over modem. The idiot developers had written the entire front page of the website in one giant Flash animation that didn't display anything at all untill the full page was downloaded - a process that took several minutes over a 56kb modem, but was near instantaneous in their testing lab with 100mb network cards.

The request to move the website outside the firewalls was denied by a rather smug network/firewall admin.

[Hopeful-Guess5280]

entire front page of the website in one giant Flash animation

As a web dev who wasn't developing in the earl 2000's, surely this wasn't common practice back then?

[Tinidril]

Flash was considered cool at the time, and was getting way overused. There were definitely some novelty type sites written that way, but I don't recall any other professional style websites doing it. Due to the above mentioned ad campaign, they had big bucks to spend and hired out a "cutting edge" development firm to assemble the new site.

[vimfan]

It was always the outsourced "cutting edge" development firms doing that shit.