What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet

Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by dehugger on Sunday October 19, 2025 @01:35PM (#45636085)

I dunno, I think many dev are aware of the existence of RFCs, but if your work occurs at higher levels of the stack there is frequently not a pressing need to read them.

For example, you don't have to read the specific RFC to know the difference between 200, 400, and 500 status codes. Any layman's blog post (or literally just reading the response messages accompanying those codes in actual use) is enough knowledge to get you real far.

That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by Uehreka on Sunday October 19, 2025 @03:00PM (#45636915)

> That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.

I’d love to read it, but I don’t have the time.

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by rkomorn on Sunday October 19, 2025 @01:58PM (#45636326)

There's a strong inverse correlation in my career between how often a dev refers to RFCs by number alone and how much I ever want to interact (let alone work) with them again.

Doubly so for the "meta" RFCs (eg 1925).

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by woodruffw on Sunday October 19, 2025 @02:20PM (#45636545)

I understand that PKI engineers are not a very fun lot, but it seems unfair to blame them for having the various X.509 RFCs beaten into them :-)

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by rkomorn on Monday October 20, 2025 @02:57AM (#45640721)

I think it's more a correlation than a causation, and I think it's the other way around.

It's not "I tend to not want to work with people who name-drop RFCs", it's "people I don't want to work with tend to name-drop RFCs".

And PKI engineers are cool (and a lot smarter than me).

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by ellenhp on Sunday October 19, 2025 @02:17PM (#45636522)

Would you mind elaborating on why you believe people need to have that number memorized to deserve the title senior?

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by worik on Sunday October 19, 2025 @02:33PM (#45636679)

Not the number

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by dehugger on Sunday October 19, 2025 @11:42PM (#45640027)

RFC 3339 describes how to record time in a consistent and interopable manner, expanding onto ISO 8601.

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by ellenhp on Monday October 20, 2025 @01:28AM (#45640360)

Thanks for the summary of the document, but not quite what I asked for. Why would e.g. a VHDL engineer need to have read it to deserve the title senior?

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Re:What Are RFCs? The Forgotten Blueprints of the Internet by dehugger on Monday October 20, 2025 @12:50PM (#45646079)

Well you are kinda straw manning me, considering my own words were "that's a problem" and not "don't deserve a title senior engineer". I also specifically said "senior dev" and not "senior engineer", which are very different things. Maybe re-read the comment chain with fresh eyes, since you seem to have taken a very antagonistic interpretation?

I think most people here can agree that seniors should be aware of standards for recording time. If you know you should write a date as "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss" (add precision or timezone information as required) then congratulations you are aware of the necessary standards.

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