Blueprints
Algorithms & Architecture
The Transformer: Attention Is All You Need
A 2017 paper from Google replaced recurrence with self-attention — and created the architecture behind GPT, BERT, and the modern AI revolution.
Diffie-Hellman: The Key Exchange That Made RSA Possible
Before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman built the lock, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman proved the lock could exist. Their 1976 paper is where public-key cryptography actually begins.
Digital Signatures: Running Public-Key Crypto in Reverse
You sign with your private key. Anyone verifies with your public key. That one asymmetry underlies software updates, TLS certificates, git commits, and every system that has to trust code without trusting the channel.
The @ Sign: How Email Was Smuggled Onto ARPANET
Ray Tomlinson combined two existing programs as an unauthorized side project, picked a punctuation mark nobody used in their name, and accidentally built the network's first killer app.
Packet Switching: How the Network Carries Anything
Circuit switching wastes bandwidth on silence. Packet switching chops messages into independent pieces and lets the network forget the conversation. That one shift is the reason the internet exists.
The RSA Math, Line by Line
Euler's theorem, modular inverses, and why `(m^e)^d ≡ m (mod n)` actually works — a walkthrough of the math the RSA post breezes through in a code block.
TCP Congestion Control: Nagle to BBR
Forty years of trying to answer one question — how fast should you send packets when you can't see the network you're sending them through?
The Three-Way Handshake, Packet by Packet
Why TCP needs exactly three packets to open a connection, what the SYN and ACK bits actually do, and why the initial sequence number being predictable became a security disaster.
Why TCP Was Split Into TCP and IP
The original TCP was one protocol that did routing, reliability, and addressing all at once. Jon Postel's 1978 argument for splitting it in two unlocked UDP, real-time video, the hourglass architecture, and almost everything that came after.
Blockchain: Trust Without Trustees
Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper introduced a mechanism for consensus without central authority — and sparked a revolution in decentralized systems.
MapReduce: Thinking in Parallel
Google's programming model for processing massive datasets across thousands of machines changed how we think about distributed computation.
REST: Architecture for the Scalable Web
Roy Fielding's dissertation formalized the architectural style that would become the standard for web APIs.
PageRank: The Algorithm That Organized the Web
Two Stanford grad students asked a simple question — what if a link is a vote? — and built the algorithm that made the web's infinite library searchable.
The URL: Addressing Everything
Berners-Lee's third invention gave every resource on earth a single, stable name — and turned the web from a collection of documents into a navigable space.
RSA Encryption: Secrets in Plain Sight
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman solved a problem that seemed impossible — letting strangers communicate securely without sharing a secret first.
TCP/IP: The Protocol That Connected Everything
Two engineers in a hotel lobby, one impossible problem: make any network talk to any other network. How Cerf and Kahn's 1974 paper became the foundation of the internet.
HTTP: The Protocol That Delivered the Web
Tim Berners-Lee's simple request-response protocol turned the internet into a global hypertext system.