track: journey of a tap

7 articles · newest first

Flat illustration of a restaurant cutaway: a dining room with a customer on one side, a kitchen with a cook on the other

Frontend vs backend: the dining room and the kitchen

Lesson 6 of the journey of a tap: every part of your app lives on one side of a wall. Which side decides who can see it.

Sam Ortega · 42m ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a person pointing at an item on a large menu while a kitchen hatch passes out a plate

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What is an API? The menu your server serves

Lesson 5 of the journey of a tap: the list of requests a server will accept, why your app uses other people's too, and what an API key really is.

Sam Ortega · 42m ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a friendly server cabinet with blinking lights connected by dotted lines to several phones

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What is a server? The computer that answers

Lesson 4 of the journey of a tap: where the request lands, what that computer can see, and why "serverless" still means servers.

Sam Ortega · 42m ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a customer handing an order slip across a café counter and getting a tray back

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What is a request? The message behind every tap

Lesson 3 of the journey of a tap: what's actually inside the little message your phone sends, and the answer that comes back.

Sam Ortega · 42m ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a person looking up a name in a giant phone book, with a dotted line to a house on a hill

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What is DNS? How your phone finds a website

Lesson 2 of the journey of a tap: your phone knows a name, not a location. How it turns aliteq.com into a number it can actually reach.

Sam Ortega · 43m ago · 4 min

Flat illustration of a person holding an addressed envelope and pointing at one highlighted house on a map

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What is a URL? The address every tap starts with

Lesson 1 of the journey of a tap: the address your phone reads before anything else happens, and the four parts it's made of.

Sam Ortega · 43m ago · 4 min

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What is a backend? Explained for vibe coders, with a drawing

Frontend, server, database, API, secrets: the parts of your app you can't see, drawn as the journey of one tap, and why every security rule has to live on the far side of it.

Sam Ortega · 46m ago · 6 min