You and Me Learn All About HTTP with Safia Abdalla

I'm an open source maintainer on the nteract project, a writer, and a software engineer at Microsoft working open source web technologies. I'm passionate about bringing people together to build great things and using storytelling to share knowledge.

This talk covers the history, fundamentals, and applications of HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). The talk follows this rough breakdown:

1. Introduce the original problem that HTTP was intended to solve when the Internet was created and why it was the right solution at the time.
2. Describe the fundamental process of the original version of HTTP
3. Exploration of the shortcomings in HTTP that were discovered as the Internet grew and how HTTP evolved to address them, including:
4. Supporting transport of different document types
5. Improving the performance/reliability of the protocol
6. Improving security via HTTPS

Here is a download link to the talk slides (PDF)

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This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Comments

[Vaidehi Joshi]

Thanks for the great, in-depth talk, @captainsafia ! I'm curious to know, in your experience, what is the hardest part about learning and teaching HTTP protocols?

[Omar]

Thanks! I will make sure to watch it when it's uploaded.

[Ceora Ford]

omg i need this so badly!! I'm so happy to be listening to this talk

[Chase Nickels]

This is such a great break down of HTTPS and the WRRC! I would love to hear more about the relationship between a front end and back end and how to handle all of these different processes while maintaining optimized performance when handling "promises" in the HTTP world.

[Ben Halpern]

Will http ever be abstracted away to the point that learning about it is exceptionally rare?

I already feel like it’s rare that folks take the time to teach it, as you have today.

[NaveenKumar Namachivayam ⚡]

Thanks. This was informative.