[progbits]

If you haven't done it before, I strongly recommend picking some RFC and implementing it, with no other references (you can of course look up language and library questions, just without referencing existing implementations or anything specific to that RFC).

It's really nice to have a complete and rigorous specification. It's quite common today for docs to be extremely incomplete or vague, especially as more and more teams use LLM to generate a lot of prose that is devoid of information.

For example 1495 is nice if you like IRC. You can pick to implement a server and try to connect with existing clients to validate your implementation, or make a client and join your favorite server (though test on some test server first).

[1718627440]

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes you still don't understand how you should do something, even after having read the RFC multiple times, so you still need to look what other implementations are doing.

[placebo]

I actually did exactly that for a product back in the days when there was no open implementation. IRC, SMTP, POP3, DNS. Good times :)

[ackreq]

That’s exactly how you learn the depth of a specification.