Tinkering Under the Hood

This past summer, while Kitt Peak National Observatory was shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, I took some online courses in web design. Web design is something I’ve learned largely on the job without any formal education, so even though I had been designing and editing web sites for several years, I decided to start with some fairly basic classes to improve my formal understanding of the process. One of the subjects covered was “hypertext transfer protocol.” This is basically the protocol comp...