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How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians
A lively profile of astronomer Cliff Stoll, who caught a KGB-linked hacker in the 1980s and now spends his days making g…
How AI Works, Plain English
A no-math, plain-English explanation of how modern AI models like DALL-E actually work, built up from simple ideas with…
How AWS S3 Serves 1 PB per Second on Slow HDDs
An accessible tour of how Amazon S3 spreads data across tens of millions of hard drives to reach enormous throughput, us…
How Compaq Cloned IBM
The Internet History Podcast tells the true story behind Halt and Catch Fire: how Compaq reverse-engineered the IBM PC B…
How DCI Movie Delivery and Encryption Works
A detailed tour of how digital cinema packages are built, encrypted and keyed so movies can be shown in theaters around…
How Does an FPGA Work?
A clear illustrated SparkFun tutorial explaining what FPGAs are, how lookup tables and logic blocks become hardware, and…
How Does Shazam Work?
A clear walk-through of audio fingerprinting, from spectrograms to peak hashing, culminating in a small working song-rec…
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How Duke Nukem II's Parallax Scrolling Worked
An illustrated deep dive into how the 1993 DOS game Duke Nukem II faked smooth parallax backgrounds on slow PCs, with an…
How Game Boy Cartridges Work: More Than You Wanted to Know
A friendly, illustrated deep dive into how Game Boy cartridges talk to the console, covering buses, memory maps, bank co…
How Google Maps Allocates Survival in London
A data-driven look at how Google Maps ratings and visibility shape which of 13,000 London restaurants thrive, with a das…
How HTTPS Works
A comic that follows Certificat as she explains why HTTPS matters and how certificates and encryption work together, in…
How I Also Hacked My Car
A first-person write-up of reverse-engineering a car's infotainment system, with the dead ends and clever tricks needed…
How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
A famous reverse-engineering write-up that found and fixed a years-old GTA Online load-time bug.
How I put my whole life into a single database
Felix Krause tracked hundreds of daily metrics for years, from mood and sleep to weather and location, and shares dozens…
How I Reverse Engineered Google Docs
James Somers explains how he dug into Google Docs revision data to replay any document keystroke by keystroke, and shows…
How I Take Math Lecture Notes with LaTeX and Vim
A famous write-up on typing live mathematics lecture notes in LaTeX using Vim snippets, with animated demos of how fast…
How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET
A short, funny piece of early internet lore about how a science fiction author managed to get himself banned from the AR…
How Pitfall Builds its World
An approachable deep-dive into how the Atari 2600 game Pitfall squeezed 255 jungle screens into a few kilobytes using a…
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
A reverse-engineering deep dive into how the 1994 game Pizza Tycoon moved dozens of cars around its city on tiny hardwar…
How Samba Was Written
Andrew Tridgell's famous 2003 account of reverse engineering a proprietary network protocol, told with a witty analogy a…
How Serious Sam Handled Masses of Enemies on 56k Modems
An analysis of the Serious Engine 1 source code explaining how Croteam synchronized hundreds of enemies over slow dial-u…
How the Soviets Put a Lander on Venus
How Soviet engineers, after repeated failures, built Venera probes tough enough to survive crushing pressure and furnace…
How to Become a Computer Science Engineer at MIT for Free
A curriculum of about 40 free university courses arranged over four academic years, giving a self-taught route through a…
How to Copy a File from a 30-Year-Old Laptop
A fun retro-computing adventure about getting one file off a three-decade-old laptop with no modern ports, using improvi…
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