If you’re working at a start-up it’s very likely that it’ll be powered by technology and that you’ll be involved in developing or shaping the product to some extent, even if you are in a non-technical role. Whilst this doesn’t mean that you need to become a technical whizz and learn to code, it does mean that it would be beneficial for you to understand the basics of modern web technologies. So whether you are looking to work in operations, sales, marketing or business development, this lesson was written with you in mind.

Contents

  1. How the internet works
  2. Hardware and software
  3. Front end and back end
  4. Data structures and algorithms
'The first version of Google was named “Backrub” and was released on Stanford’s website in August 1996. They renamed the search engine “Google” in 1997, which is a play on the word “googol” coined by a mathematician and meaning the number one followed by 100 zeros.

How the internet works

The internet is very much part of our lives, both at home and at work, but have you ever wondered how it really works? How does information move around the internet?

Let’s start by thinking about what it takes for you to view a simple blog, for example, the TalentPool blog - www.talentpool.com/blog. When you enter the URL into your browser and press enter, a few things happen:

  1. Your browser establishes a connection between your computer and the web server that hosts the TalentPool website.
  2. Once a connection has been made, the browser can ask for the resources required to display the website for www.talentpool.com.
  3. The web server now needs to figure out what content to return to respond to the request. For the web page www.talentpool.com/blog, the server needs to find the most recent blog posts. It fetches these from a database and puts together the web page in the correct format.
  4. The web server returns the web page structure in its response which may include links to other resources the browser will have to fetch separately such as images or fonts.
  5. Finally, when the browser has fetched all the information it needs to display the website, the page will appear for the user and the browser will close the connection with the web server.

So, at a very high level, when a user interacts with a web application a connection is made through the browser, followed by a series of requests. The web server computes some things and then responds, and finally the browser puts everything together and renders the output (i.e. the blog).

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