When you run a program, your computer is not doing one thing at a time: it breaks every instruction down into a meticulous assembly line that processes millions of operations per second. Understanding...
When a website offers “Sign in with Google” or “Continue with GitHub”, you are not handing your password to that site. Behind that button lies a protocol called OAuth 2.0, the ...
When you type an address like tech.atrilit.com into your browser, your machine has no idea where it is. The internet doesn’t understand names: it only understands IP addresses, sequences of numb...
When JSON is no longer enough In modern services, applications no longer talk to each other in a human language: there are thousands of processes, often on different servers, exchanging requests and r...
More than “packaging software” When you launch Docker, it feels like you have a small, fast virtual machine. In reality there is no virtual machine: a container is a normal Linux process r...
When you chat with an AI assistant, what happens behind the screen is not a lookup in a database of answers. Behind it is a large language model (LLM): a neural network that does not “know”...
Git is arguably the most widely used tool in software development, and yet almost nobody needs to know how it works internally to use it. But understanding its data model explains why it behaves the w...
WebAssembly (or Wasm for short) is a low-level binary format that browsers can execute at near-native speed. It was born with a concrete promise: that a web application could run as fast as an install...
When you send a message through a messaging app, the temptation is to think that “encryption” protects everything. But there is a huge difference between encryption in transit and end-to-e...
For almost twenty years, HTTP/1.1 and later HTTP/2 traveled over TCP, the transport protocol that guarantees packets arrive in order and without loss. But TCP has a structural problem that becomes obv...
When you browse a modern application, you almost never interact with a single program. Behind the scenes there are dozens of services (authentication, payments, notifications, search) that must coordi...
When you click a link, your browser does not have to go all the way to the original server to bring you the page: many times it receives it from a server much closer to your home. That is the job of a...
When you upload a photo to your phone, the backup lands in an invisible system that can store billions of objects: object storage. It is the technology that underpins photo services, backups, on-deman...
Kubernetes: the orchestrator that manages thousands of containers In an earlier article we explained what a container is: that package that wraps an application with everything it needs to run in an i...
Every time you click “buy”, send a message or check your balance, something very specific happens in the background: a database receives your request, processes it and returns a response i...
If you have ever heard that a data center server can “contain” dozens of computers at once, it is not a metaphor. It is virtualization, one of the technologies that sustain the cloud, mode...
When you open a web page, there is an invisible moment in which your browser and the server shake hands and agree on how to talk without anyone else being able to listen. That moment is the TLS handsh...
Every time you type an address into the browser, your computer asks a question as old as it is useful: where is that server? The answer is given by the DNS (Domain Name System), the infrastructure tha...
When we say “5G” almost everyone thinks of their phone downloading videos faster. It is true, but it is only part of the story. The fifth generation of mobile networks was designed from sc...
When you hear about a graphics card or a GPU (graphics processing unit), the first thing that comes to mind is video games. But that chip is today one of the engines of artificial intelligence, cinema...
When you type a question into a chat and the model answers in seconds, behind it is one of the most complex software architectures that exist. Large language models (LLMs) do not “search” ...
Containers: the packaging that changed how applications travel At the end of the twentieth century a common problem in data centers was the “it works on my machine” issue. An application t...
HTTP/3 and QUIC: the new protocol making the internet faster If you have ever wondered why a page takes a while to load even though you have plenty of fiber, the answer lies in something deeper than b...
For more than half a century, the word “disk” described something literal: metal platters spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, with a mechanical arm positioning a needle to rea...
When you press play on a series, tens of megabytes per second start moving across your screen without you lifting a finger. But behind that gesture there is a chain of processes we rarely stop to look...
Imagine a car that drives itself. Without anyone touching the wheel, the vehicle decides when to brake, when to turn and how to dodge a pedestrian crossing unexpectedly. This is no longer science fict...
Quantum computing: when computers stop counting one by one You may have heard about quantum computing and it might sound like science fiction. However, it is one of the most promising technologies of ...
For years, the password was the master key to our digital life. A set of letters, numbers and symbols that we had to memorize and change every few months. Today, more and more devices ask us for somet...
Have you ever stopped to think about how your phone knows exactly which street you are on, or how an app warns you about the traffic jam just as you reach the roundabout? Behind that small everyday mi...