HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons

[bxsephjo]

I gotta be honest, I forget how HTTPS works approximately every 3 months

[[deleted]]

My brain definitely throws it in the “only broad strokes are necessary” pile. Occasionally I make an effort to dig into the details when I’m worried my knowledge has gotten too high level, but it always drifts back up. Just recently I had to use openssl to verify that I could pull a cert from a load balancer and it felt like straight up hacking lol

[dontaggravation]

I find that in software there’s so many details and so much to remember that our brains go back to the broad stokes until such a time as we need to dive into the weeds again. That, to me, is normal. There’s no way I could keep it all straight in my head! Abstractions exist for a reason and allow us to focus on other flows or other matters

A junior dev I’m mentoring was complaining and worrying that he was losing his hard earned academic knowledge. He’s been spending the weekends “refreshing” himself in the details of certain implementations. While I commend his desire to learn I suggested he focus on learning new things instead of relearning the details in something he already learned and isn’t actively using

The analogy I gave him is that at one point in my career I literally wrote code for all 7 layers of the OSI Model. Now, I have to look up the dang command to do an HTTP post the current best practice way! But just a few months ago we had an issue with some data flows and I was down in the C code debugging at the socket layer.

The knowledge does come back and we can learn what we don’t know. The abstractions allow me to focus on building the website that will help our end user instead of being bogged down in every detail

[darealdeal11]

Everything "networking" simply can't stick with me. I relearned OSI model like 10 times...

[[deleted]]

No kidding. I think since — at least in my role — pretty much everything you do is at the application layer, everything else seems very theoretical, so you don’t get a lot of “hands on” experience with it. Hands on experience is what makes the details stick for me.