Resources
Short narrated films that go with the lessons, in the order the course uses them. Each has captions and a full transcript, and each works without sound if you read along.
11 films · about 71 minutes in all
01 · Prequel film · 7:31
A narrated film on where the web came from: CERN in 1989, the three inventions (URL, HTML, HTTP), and what the web was built to be.
02 · Series intro film · 6:14
A narrated six-minute film: eight people open the same store in the same second, and the ladder of user needs decides who gets to buy the fleece.
03 · Film · 11:49
A narrated film on the client-server model: who makes a web request, what the network does to it, what the server sends back, and why your laptop is lying to you about all of it.
04 · Film · 6:49
A narrated film on the round trips a page pays before its first byte arrives: the address-bar guess, DNS, the route, the TCP handshake, TLS and the certificate check, the request and its redirect, and how each step fails.
05 · Short · 2:43
A short narrated film: each part of a URL is read by someone different. The scheme by the browser, the host by DNS, the port by the connection, the path and query by the server, and the fragment by no one but the browser.
06 · Film · 8:43
A narrated film on what a web page is made of: a tree of URLs, each fetched over HTTP and labelled with a MIME type, and how the shape of that tree decides how the page loads.
07 · Short · 2:07
A short narrated film on the request the browser makes only to ask whether its copy is still good: ETag and If-None-Match, a 304 with no body, and the three answers a response can give to "keep it?".
08 · Film · 6:58
A narrated film on the HTTP message: a first line, headers, and a body. Who writes the Content-Type label, what happens when it is wrong, and how anyone can add a type, a scheme, or a handler.
09 · Film · 5:37
A narrated film on what you take on when a page loads someone else's file: slow, blocked, missing, watching and hostile resources on Demo Company's pages, and the line or two of HTML that answers each.
10 · Film for the Availability lesson · 6:15
A six-minute narrated film on Google's RAIL model: why engineering needs numbers, the human limits behind RAIL's budgets, making them your own, and Core Web Vitals as today's scoreboard.
11 · Film for the Availability lesson · 6:20
A six-minute narrated film based on brr's article Engineering for Slow Internet: what the internet is like in Antarctica, what our software does to people there, and what to build instead.