The intantness of chat apps has always been a mystery to me.
The technical details of moving emojis through The Internet Pipes and across continents in 0.004 miliseconds is well beyond my paygrade.

But I got a tiny window of insight into the magic while illustrating notes for

on building chat apps with

Vue

and

Socket.io

Turns out it's not magic, but instead done through

. Which are like little portals that hold open a consistent connection between two machines.

I obviously still haven't a clue what goes on inside that dark little portal. Thankfully using tools like Vue & Socket.io save us from that level of depth.

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Want more illustrated notes on web development?

Take a look at

,

Speaking the GraphQL Query Language

or

A Fresh Serving of JavaScript ES2019