About

Small Big Picture explains how real systems work. Each episode takes something you do in seconds, like pressing Play, sending a message, or typing a web address, and shows the engineering underneath it, drawn as a small world you can follow: tiny cars on a city map, a post office for messages, a library for DNS.

Two viewers at once

Every episode is made for someone who knows no technology and for an engineer at the same time. The story carries the first; the details are exact enough for the second.

How episodes are researched

• Claims come from primary sources: engineering blogs, papers, standards and official documentation.
• Each episode keeps a claim ledger: the quote, the source, its date and its limits.
• A company's published facts appear on dated cards. Where a design is our own sketch of how such a system could work, it is labelled an interview sketch.
• Numbers we made up to illustrate a point are labelled as illustrative.

Found a mistake?

Write to hello@smallbigpicture.com. Corrections are welcome and get fixed.