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I’d actually argue that it’s perhaps great that the abstractions work well enough for someone to not know networking to be productive in web development.

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You can be productive, but it produces a lot of bad externalities, like news websites that load 30 trackers and drain the user's phone battery.

To be fair you don’t need to know about the TCP/IP protocol to know loading 30 trackers is a bad idea.

+1 but flip side: What _do_ you need to know?

Test your apps on a device test cloud to see how they work?

That data transfer takes time. Load less and, all else being equal, your site will be faster.

I think you should know about head-of-line blocking in HTTP1, how to fix it in HTTP/2, and maybe to test how much memory all your JavaScripting uses?

This is why computers are 100000x faster but feel no faster or slower with many "webapps"

Web apps being slow has next to nothing to do with not understanding networking.

All you need to remember is IO is 'slow'/unknown. That will get you far.

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