[jwfergus]

>It's also really fun to write complex networking apps from scratch

I agree and disagree. It definitely is fun to write awesome complex code, in general, but I'm currently in the middle of developing a network application and the most frustrating part was the socket handling. Everything riding on top of these connections was fun, but actually working out the TCP logic was un-fun.

That said, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I'm sure you're not the only one to love TCP coding, and I'm glad you guys exist to write tutorials for people like me :)

[peterwwillis]

I write modules to decode network protocols for fun. So yeah, maybe i'm not quite right in the head.

On the other hand, it taught me about perverted networking standards like 802.1Q which is more common than you'd expect, and helps when you're trying to figure out why tcpdump isn't returning results you expected.