Welcome

Behind every page you open there is a chain of machines and agreements that works so well it goes unseen. This course makes it visible, piece by piece, so that technology stops being a black box in your work.

What you will find

• Block 1. How the Internet works. What the Internet is, who talks to whom and how a request gets from your browser to a server: clients and servers, IP addresses, the access provider, DNS, network devices and ports.
• Block 2. The Web: domains, hosting and HTTP. What it takes for a website to exist and be seen: a domain name, DNS records, a place to host it, the protocol the browser and server use to talk to each other, HTTPS encryption and the program that serves the pages.
• Block 3. Servers: from hardware to the cloud. What is inside a server and how you work with it: the operating system, why it is almost always Linux, how you log in over SSH, what distinguishes a physical machine from a virtual one and from the cloud, and the bare minimum on backups and protection.
• Block 4. Open Source: free software and its licences. What free and open-source software is, what its licences allow and require, how a community is organised and how the companies that publish it make a living, with Odoo as an example.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.