Drawn Badly, Explained Grandly
Short, visual explanations of routing, switching, DNS, MPLS and the bits that make the internet work.
Latest explanations
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What Happens When You Play a Game Online? (It Throws Your Data Away)
For live traffic, late is worse than missing. UDP is built entirely around that idea.
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What Happens When Your Whole House Is Online at Once? (The Internet Only Sees One of You)
Every device in the house has an address. The internet only ever sees one of them.
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What Happens When You Hit Print? (The Box In The Cupboard Taught Itself)
The box in the cupboard was switched on knowing nothing about the room. It learned the lot by eavesdropping.
Why stick figures?
Because a drawing that takes twenty minutes to make takes twenty minutes to read. A stick figure takes a second, and the second it saves you is spent on the idea instead of the illustration.
Networking is not difficult so much as badly introduced — usually as a wall of acronyms with the reasoning left out. Strip the diagram back to a few lines and the mechanism underneath is usually simple enough to draw on a napkin. That is what these are.
Start with a topic
Five places to begin, depending on what you are trying to work out.
Service Provider Networking
How separate networks connect to each other, which is what the internet actually is.
Merch is on the way. Stick figures on things, eventually.
