Rails can feel massive, full of magic, and uncomfortable until we understand how web servers work. At the end of the day, Rails sits between two strings: a request and a response. A web server extracts information from the request, gives it to your app (Rails), and then writes the response back across the Internet. A web framework gives us convenient abstractions for working with the request and response. This presentation will provide an understanding of requests and responses and how to work with them. We will learn by writing our own web server. If we have time, we can even try serving up a Rails or Sinatra app on our server!