On the topic of "HTTP is just text," I was amazed the first time I made a raw request by hand with netcat. It's not surprising if you're familiar with HTTP/1.1,

On the topic of "HTTP is just text," I was amazed the first time I made a raw request by hand with netcat. It's not surprising if you're familiar with HTTP/1.1, but at the time, it felt like magic to be able to write out the request by hand. Just install netcat, run an HTTP server, write nc localhost 80 GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost and hit enter twice. With the transition to HTTP/2, we gained a lot, but binary frames and TLS take away that eureka moment when you see a wireshark trace and suddenly understand more of what your computer is doing.