// the find
alex/what-happens-when
An attempt to answer the age old interview question "What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?"
A single long-form collaborative document that tries to answer the classic interview question - what actually happens when you type a URL and hit enter - in exhaustive technical detail, from USB keyboard scancodes through DNS/TCP/TLS to browser rendering. It's aimed at people studying for systems/networking interviews or just wanting the full stack explained end to end, not at people looking for runnable code.
Goes deeper than almost anything else on this topic - it actually covers OS-specific code paths (Win32K.sys message pump, OS X NSEvent/Mach ports, Linux Xorg/evdev) instead of hand-waving 'the OS handles it'. The TCP handshake, congestion control, and TLS handshake sections are genuinely accurate and specific (cites actual flag names, field semantics). Structured with a clickable table of contents so it works as a reference, not just a linear read. Picked up enough contributors to get translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
It's one giant .rst file - there's no code to run, no tests, nothing to integrate, so 'last push 2024' is misleading as a freshness signal since it's really a wiki-style doc. Content has rotted in spots: it still describes SPDY as something 'Google browsers' negotiate, which was deprecated and replaced by HTTP/2 around 2015, and there's no mention of HTTP/3, QUIC, or DoH/DoT anywhere. Quality is uneven because it's crowdsourced - some sections (TLS, TCP) are precise, others are thin or stale, and the maintainers explicitly disclaim the translations as unreviewed. The only CI artifact is a .travis.yml, which tells you nothing is actually being checked for accuracy.