Practical writing on automation, realtime systems, and the engineering behind software that runs itself.
Add a second server to a realtime app and half your messages vanish with no error at all. A backplane fixes it — and quietly caps how far you can scale.
A WebSocket frame has no header names and no delimiters — just bit-packed binary. Learn the first two bytes and you can decode any frame by hand from a hex dump.
SignalR hides four different realtime transports behind one API and walks down them until something works. Sabotage the environment and watch the ladder decide.
Most realtime features only push one way. SSE does that over plain HTTP, with automatic reconnection and stream resume built into the browser — no handshake, no library.
An HTTP GET goes out, a 101 comes back, and the same TCP socket stops speaking HTTP forever. Here is every header, the SHA-1 transform behind Sec-WebSocket-Accept, and why it exists.
For six years the web faked realtime with hanging GETs and hidden iframes. It worked everywhere — and it cost roughly 40 bytes of HTTP headers for every byte of actual data.
13 articles total