Reverse engineering a day’s worth of websites

Some light reverse-engineering of websites has been a source of entertainment and knowledge for me. I’ll poke around in the Chrome DevTools and figure out the basics of how popular websites work.

Sure, it’s common to compress JavaScript and other resources, and the HTML source of webpages no longer give many hints for technology – long gone are the days of having a <meta name=generator tag that revealed your tech stack. But it’s pretty easy to suss out the major tech involved and reading obfuscated source isn’t too bad. The more you practice the easier it is to notice the patterns.

Here’s some of what I look at in a day, with some quick reverse-engineering applied. It’s interesting to get a sample of these applications, the ones that I use on a daily basis.

I’ve used Fastmail for six years as an alternative to GMail. It’s the first thing I open every day. I like them a lot. I am not happy that they laid of 60% of the bargaining unit of a union that attempted to get a contract.

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