Member-only story
Modern Web Architecture 101
Everything that happens between a click and a page — plus a little of the 201 you’ll want next
Hi friends 👋
Over the next fifteen minutes we’re going to walk through every major component of a modern web application, one request at a time. By the end, the whole picture will fit in your head.
If you’re not a Medium member, you can read the full article for free using my friend link.
And if you find it useful, following on Medium (@akovtun) is the best way to catch the next one — I publish deep-dives on Rails, distributed systems, and interview prep.
Let’s get into it!
When I was starting out as a developer, I could build features but I couldn’t see the system. I knew my code ran “on a server” the way I knew my food came “from a farm.” The day someone finally walked me through the whole picture — every box, every arrow — was the day backend work stopped feeling like folklore and started feeling like engineering.
This article is that walkthrough. It’s inspired by Jonathan Fulton’s “Web Architecture 101” from 2017 — an article so loved that readers printed the diagram and hung it on their walls. But nine years is several lifetimes in infrastructure, and the comment section under that…
