Networking Concepts Every Developer Must Understand
In modern development, networking is no longer optional knowledge. Whether you are building APIs, deploying cloud applications, or debugging production issues, these concepts show up everywhere.
As a software developer, you may spend a lot of time thinking about top-notch coding, code optimisation, and choosing a framework to work with. However, independent of your coding skills, your code will have to travel through a network to get to your users, servers, or other services that you might need to use. Learning simple networking concepts can make it easier to troubleshoot problems that arise, write better systems, and even explain your concepts to backend programmers and DevOps guys.
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Protocols govern the flow of data over a network. They are a set of rules that must be followed and agreed upon by the two communicating parties before any communication can take place. HTTP is the protocol that specifies how requests and responses for web data are made. TCP, on the other hand, is a protocol that guarantees the delivery of data packets, while UDP is a protocol that gives priority to the speed of data transfer rather than its reliability. Selecting the right protocol is important because it has a direct impact on the performance, trustworthiness, and overall user experience of the system.
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Essentially, an IP address is a device’s identity on a network. As your home has a physical address, which allows people to locate it, similarly, every device that is connected to the internet has an IP address so that the data knows where to be delivered. For example, if your laptop requests something from a server, it sends its IP address so that the server knows where to send the response. IP addresses are crucial, as without them, devices would be essentially blind to each other, and the internet would be a mess.
