Concepts

Short, friendly explainers of the tools and ideas behind modern websites – written for the curious, assuming no technical background. Each one starts with a one-sentence definition, then opens into as much depth as you'd like.

• Astro Astro is a modern tool for building websites that turns your writing and design into plain, ready-made pages – so the site is fast, simple, and needs no database humming in the background. It reflects a quiet shift in how the web is built: away from heavy machinery that assembles every page on demand, toward light pages prepared ahead of time and delivered instantly.
• Cloudflare Cloudflare is a company that delivers your website to visitors for you – keeping a copy in hundreds of cities around the world so it loads fast everywhere, and quietly handling all the hard, invisible work of running a fast, safe site so you never have to think about it.
• Docker Docker lets you wrap a piece of software, along with everything it needs to run, into a neat self-contained box that works the same way on any computer. You can start one of these boxes in seconds, run several side by side without them interfering, and throw them away just as easily – on your own machine or on a server far away.
• Git Git is a kind of perfect undo button for your work – it quietly remembers every version of your files as you go, so you can always look back at what changed, return to any earlier moment, and never fear breaking something beyond repair. It lives right on your own computer, and you can use it without sharing anything with anyone.
• Linux Linux is the quiet, sturdy operating system that runs most of the world's servers – and something very close to it lives inside your Mac and your Android phone too. You only need a little of it to work confidently: the idea that files belong to users with permissions, and a small handful of typed commands for moving around and looking at things.
• nginx nginx is the program that answers when someone asks your website for a page. It took over the web by being unusually good at waiting – holding tens of thousands of open connections on one ordinary machine, where the older way would have buckled – and today most of it does a second job: standing at your site's front door and sorting arrivals before they reach whatever does the real work.
• npm npm is the tool that fetches and manages the ready-made building blocks your project borrows from others. Almost every modern web project leans on pieces other people have written and shared; npm goes and gathers exactly the ones your project needs, in the right versions, with a single command.
• SSH SSH is a way to sit down at another computer from your own – safely typing commands on a machine across the room or across the world, as if you were right in front of it. It's how people work on faraway servers, and, with a little help, even on a friend's laptop in another country.
• Tailscale Tailscale quietly joins your own devices – your laptop, your phone, the computer sitting at home – into one small private network that travels with them anywhere in the world, so they can reach each other as though they were all plugged into the same home router, with nothing opened up to strangers and no server of your own to run.