Episode - 1 : Networking Basics for Noobs

Hello, Rajat here.

Most of us use the internet every day. If you are reading this blog, you are probably one of them too.

We open multiple websites and applications every day, not counting the doom-scrolling on Instagram reels and posts on X. But once you start your tech career, the curiosity to understand what happens under the hood naturally increases.

And if that curiosity has not kicked in yet, it should.

This blog is an introductory piece meant to ignite that curiosity. My goal is simple : to help you understand why computer networking is worth learning, why you should spend time exploring it, and how it can help you become a better engineer.

Have you ever asked yourself questions like these?

• How are we able to send messages to our friends on X ?

• How are we able to create posts, upload files, watch videos, join calls, and access websites from almost anywhere in the world?

• What even is a computer network?

• How is your mobile phone or laptop identified on the internet?

• How does a website know where to send data when you open it? Why does the response come back to your computer instead of your friend’s computer?

• When you type www.google.com in your browser, how does your computer know where Google’s servers are?

• Why can you open five apps at once and receive data in all of them without anything getting mixed up?

• Why does a video call feel different from loading a webpage, even when both are using the same Wi-Fi?

• How does your data travel from your laptop to Google’s servers, which may be miles away, when you click “Upload” in Google Drive?

• Why do some websites open instantly in India but take a few seconds from New Zealand?

• What does a firewall actually do, and why does it not block everything?

• What really happens when you connect to a server?

• Why does your home router give every device an address, but only one address seems to talk to the outside world?

• What does “cloud” actually mean at the network level?

• What is this IP address everyone keeps talking about?

• What are CIDR, the OSI model, DNS, handshakes, and all these other networking terms?

• What is an AWS VPC?

• What is NAT?

Many of you may have jumped directly into learning containers and Kubernetes. But do you really understand how container networking and Kubernetes networking work?

And have you ever seriously thought about security? Not just as a “vibe coding” meme, but as something that matters in real systems?

If even one of these questions makes you curious about computer networking, then the aim of this article is complete.

This networking series will come in multiple parts. I do not want to dump everything into one huge blog and have people commenting “TL;DR” under it.

Thanks for reading.
Happy learning.

Signing off!