What actually happens when we visit a website? As developers, we're supposed to know all about this, but when our browsers have millions of lines of code, and our backends have fancy service-oriented-architectures with dozens of components, it's hard to keep it all in our heads. Fortunately, we have amazing tools to help us. We can bypass the complexity of browsers and servers, and simply examine the communication between them. Let's use these tools and look at the underlying patterns shared across the entire web, from the simplest static pages to the most sophisticated web apps.