Networking: How do computers talk?

The Internet is practically ubiquitous. It carries our data everywhere using a set of concise rules.

Most diagrams completely abstract all of the Internet away into a literal drawing of a cloud. There’s so much stuff going on inside, though, that even many super-smart software developers don’t know about. I really want to help us all get our heads out of the clouds so we can have a better understanding of computer networks work.

After the talk, my hope is that you can answer questions like:

• What’s an IP address?
• Wait–what, seriously?
• Okay, so how come that doesn’t look like google.com at all?
• What does my home router actually do?
• What’s a MAC address?
• Literally, how does any of this even?

But mostly, I really want to show you why I think networks are totally rad. :)

Emma is an all-around nerdy queer person who wears a lot of black clothes, listens to music way too loud, climbs up walls, and works remotely as an engineer for Travis CI from the beautiful tropical paradise of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the USA. You can usually find Emma with the username “emdantrim”.