In my favourite 42 School project that I did during the Common Core, I was asked to write my own webserver. This was exciting to me, because webservers are pieces of software that you interact with everyday! This makes it a very concrete thing, yet for so many people very, very abstract. And that is precisely what fascinates me so much about and about computers in genereal; they are these immensely powerful machines that we deal with everyday, but yet they are also these black boxes that seem impossible to fully understand. By writing my own webserver I expected solve one of these mysterious uses of these machines, understand it and by doing that understanding a bit more about the world.

What I learned

And yes I learned a lot. In ways it was as complicated as I expected it to be. There were many features to implement, but at the same time the principle of socket programming makes the communication fairly straightforward, where I expected a lot of struggle. It made me realize and experience the benefits of the separation of responsibilities in the OSI model and how it allows you to focus and improve the quality of the software you a writing. Specifically, when interacting with sockets on the host system, you are not concerned with the implementation of the transport layer at all.