Latest Posts
All posts from The Tech Tree.
38 posts
Docker: Ship the Whole Machine
How containerization solved 'works on my machine' and transformed software delivery forever.
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.
ACID, One Letter at a Time
How databases actually deliver Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability — write-ahead logs, MVCC, locking schedules, and the fsync problem that's embarrassed most storage stacks at least once.
Codd's 1970 Paper, Annotated
Walking through 'A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks' — what 'relational' actually means mathematically, which ideas survived into SQL, and which quietly got dropped.
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.
The End-to-End Principle: Why the Internet Is Dumb on Purpose
Saltzer, Reed, and Clark's 1984 paper formalized the design decision that made the internet work — put intelligence at the edges, keep the middle stupid, and watch it outlast every smarter network it competed with.
The 'Lo' Crash: The Internet's First Bug Report
Why SRI's computer crashed after Charley Kline typed three letters, what actually broke, and how a buffer overflow in an auto-complete feature became the internet's origin story.
Normal Forms: 1NF → BCNF, With Examples
Codd's design rules for tables — what each anomaly looks like, how the next normal form fixes it, and when to deliberately break the rules for performance.