I'm of the opinion that we're at a good moment to redo the things DNS does with better separation of concerns by going towards "put those records on a blockchain, streamline it for known applications, reframe the hard problem around bootstrapping access to on-chain data". I'm in this latter category with DNS: I get it at a high level, but it's like a student who has only done the simple example project. Git is analogous - most uses of Git are formulaic, and the underlying concepts are simple enough - but actually accessing the right lever to pull when disaster strikes is unclear and hard to experiment with. Most people will not interact with it often enough to know how to perform the job, so they remain hesitant and try not to do anything at all with it, because it burned them once before. DNS is one of those technologies that has a simple explanation - "it's indirection" - with consequential ramifications that turn it into someone's job. So I've stopped telling people that, and instead I put a huge amount of work into trying to understand _why_ people find certain things hard and work to help remove some of those barriers. Like, I've been confused about this for years, and you're telling me that, no, actually it's easy? Not that helpful! And I kind of get it! I love DNS! I think it is surprisingly simple in many ways, and I've written about that a lot, for example in which shows you how to implement a toy DNS resolver from scratch in some pretty simple Python code.īut over the years I've learned that "no, it's easy to learn!", instead of coming off as an encouraging comment ("you can do it!"), often gets received as "no, it's not hard, actually the problem is that you're dumb". I also used to think that "no, actually, it's easy!" was an encouraging response to "this is hard to learn". It took me many years to feel totally comfortable debugging DNS problems, and I wrote this post to explain why I think it was hard for me. Hello! I wrote this post and I have a couple of things to say about this "DNS is not actually hard" take.
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