An interactive history of the technologies that built the web.https://techtree.dylandang.dev/en-UShttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-docker/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-docker/How containerization solved 'works on my machine' and transformed software delivery forever.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTWorkshopDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-transformer/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-transformer/A 2017 paper from Google replaced recurrence with self-attention — and created the architecture behind GPT, BERT, and the modern AI revolution.Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-acid/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-acid/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-codd-paper/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-codd-paper/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-diffie-hellman/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-diffie-hellman/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-digital-signatures/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-digital-signatures/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-email-origin/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-email-origin/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-end-to-end-principle/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-end-to-end-principle/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTWorkshopDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-lo-crash/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-lo-crash/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-normal-forms/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-normal-forms/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-packet-switching/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-packet-switching/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-query-optimizer/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-query-optimizer/You write what you want; the database decides how. A tour of how an optimizer parses, rewrites, estimates, and plans a SQL query — and why the same query can be fast on Monday and slow on Friday.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rfc-1/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rfc-1/Steve Crocker wrote RFC 1 in a bathroom at night because he didn't want to sound bossy. The tentative document he produced became the model for every internet standard that followed.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTWorkshopDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rsa-math/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rsa-math/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-congestion-control/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-congestion-control/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?Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-handshake/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-handshake/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-ip-split/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-ip-split/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.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-the-join/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-the-join/Expressing relationships through shared values instead of physical references was the real breakthrough of the relational model. Fifty years later, the four join types, three join algorithms, and one fundamental question still run most of the world's data.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-typescript/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-typescript/Microsoft's typed superset of JavaScript brought static analysis to the most dynamic language on earth.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTRaw MaterialsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-blockchain/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-5-blockchain/Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper introduced a mechanism for consensus without central authority — and sparked a revolution in decentralized systems.Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-mapreduce/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-mapreduce/Google's programming model for processing massive datasets across thousands of machines changed how we think about distributed computation.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-git/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-git/Linus Torvalds built Git in two weeks out of frustration, and accidentally created the tool that powers all modern software development.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTWorkshopDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-node/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-node/Google's V8 engine made JavaScript fast. Ryan Dahl's Node.js put it on the server. Together they unified web development and created the npm ecosystem.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTPower ToolsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-oauth/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-oauth/The authorization framework that lets you 'Sign in with Google' solved the password-sharing problem and enabled the platform economy.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-rest/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-4-rest/Roy Fielding's dissertation formalized the architectural style that would become the standard for web APIs.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-cookies/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-cookies/Lou Montulli's small text files solved HTTP's statelessness problem — and accidentally created the infrastructure for login sessions, shopping carts, and the ad-tracking economy.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-dom/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-dom/The W3C's Document Object Model turned static HTML into a living tree that JavaScript could read, modify, and rebuild — the API that made the interactive web possible.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTPower ToolsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-javascript/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-javascript/Brendan Eich's rush job became the world's most ubiquitous programming language. Here's how.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTRaw MaterialsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-pagerank/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-pagerank/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.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-cgi/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-cgi/A simple standard let web servers run programs instead of just serving files — turning static pages into interactive applications and opening the door to everything that followed.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTPower ToolsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-ssl/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-ssl/Netscape needed online shopping to work. That meant encrypting HTTP — so two engineers built the protocol that now protects every connection on the internet.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-url/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-url/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.Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rsa/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-rsa/Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman solved a problem that seemed impossible — letting strangers communicate securely without sharing a secret first.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-css/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-3-css/Cascading Style Sheets ended the era of font tags and gave designers a real language for visual presentation.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTRaw MaterialsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-relational-model/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-relational-model/Edgar Codd's 1970 paper gave us a mathematical foundation for databases, and SQL gave us a language to query them. IBM sat on it. Oracle shipped it first.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-ip/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-tcp-ip/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.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-arpanet/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-1-arpanet/A crashed login, a nervous grad student, and an unauthorized email — how a Cold War research project accidentally laid the foundation for the internet.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaultDylan Danghttps://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-http/https://techtree.dylandang.dev/posts/era-2-http/Tim Berners-Lee's simple request-response protocol turned the internet into a global hypertext system.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBlueprintsDylan Dang