The browser allocates a new process through a system call to the operating system, which shifts some bits around on the physical hardware that lies inside the human’s computer. Before the HTTP request hits the network, we need to hit DNS servers, engaging in the elaborate process of casting google.com into an IP address. The browser then checks whether there’s a ServiceWorker installed, and assuming there isn’t one the request finally takes the default route of querying Google’s servers for the phrase “cat in a pickle gifs”.
Naturally, Google receives this request at one of the front-end edges of its public network, in charge of balancing the load and routing requests to healthy back-end services. The query goes through a variety of analyzers that attempt to break it down to its semantic roots, stripping the query down to its essential keywords in an attempt to better match relevant results.
The search engine figures out the 10 most relevant results for “cat pickle gif” out of billions of pages in its index – which was of course primed by a different system that’s also part of the whole – and at the same time, Google pulls down a highly targeted piece of relevant advertisement about cat gifs that matches what they believe is the demographic the human making the query belongs to, thanks to a sophisticated ad network, figures out whether the user is authenticated with Google through an HTTP header session cookie and the search results page starts being constructed and streamed to the human, who now appears impatient and fidgety.
As the first few bits of HTML being streaming down the wire, the search engine produces its results and hands them back to the front-end servers, which includes it in the HTML stream that’s sent back to the human. The web browser has been working hard at this too, parsing the incomplete pieces of HTML that have been streaming down the wire as best it could, even daring to launch other admirably and equally-mind-boggling requests for HTTP resources presumed to be JavaScript, CSS, font, and image files as the HTML continues to stream down the wire. The first few chunks of HTML are converted into a DOM tree, and the browser would finally be able to begin rendering bits and pieces of the page on the screen, if it weren’t because it’s still waiting on those equally-mind-boggling CSS and font requests.
As the CSS stylesheets and fonts are transmitted, the browser begins modeling the CSSOM and getting a more complete picture of how to turn the HTML and CSS plain text chunks provided by Google servers into a graphical representation that the human finds pleasant. Browser extensions get a chance to meddle with the content, removing the highly targeted piece of relevant advertisement about cat gifs before I even realize Google hoped I wouldn’t block ads this time around.
A few seconds have passed by since I first decided to search for cat in a pickle gifs. Needless to say, thousands of others brought similarly inane requests. To the same systems. During this time.
Not only does this example demonstrate the marvelous machinery and infrastructure that fuels even our most flippant daily computing experiences, but it also illustrates how abundantly hopeless it is to make sense of a system as a whole, let alone its comprehensive state at any given point in time. After all, where do we draw the boundaries? Within the code we wrote? The code that powers our customer’s computers? Their hardware? The code that powers our servers? Its hardware? The internet as a whole? The power grid?
The overall state of a system has little to do with our ability to comprehend parts of that same system. Our focus in reducing state-based entropy must then lie in the individual aspects of the system. It’s for this reason that breaking apart large pieces of code is so effective. We’re reducing the amount of state local to each given aspect of the system, and that’s the kind of state that’s worth taking care of, since it’s what we can keep in our heads and make sense of.
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