In April 2022, I took a computer networking class which introduced me to many important networking concepts. These included the history of the Internet, TCP vs. IDP, Windows sockets, pinging, data packets, servers and clients, etc. It was fascinating to learn about the inner workings of the Internet, and how our devices connect and interact with it.

 

I gained experience in a few C++ projects during this class, but my favorite was the final project. The goal was to create a server which could host several client programs, and for the clients to be able to speak to each other using a basic chat system. At first, I used TCP sockets to get a single client to connect to the server. After that, I switched to using UDP sockets so I could more easily get several clients to connect to a single server. Once that was working, I was able to get clients to send messages to the server, which would then be displayed on each of the client's ends.