Such a honest, humble and insightful post. HTTP as a delivery truck, Websockets as a telephone! Such a relatable example, this shows the author got it right and is able to connect it well.
I can’t agree more to this tip
Try building a tiny app with both. Make a little dashboard that gets real time updates on something simple like stock prices or server load. Build one with HTTP polling. Build one with WebSockets. You will feel the difference, not just see it.
Back when I was a freshman in college, I tried doing this kind of thing for my world atlas chat app game, and failed badly, calling database for each message to send over the HTTP, what a idiot I was, but then, google searched about this and found plethora of articles about websockets and what not.
While making that, I realised the pain points getting solved with websockets and everything just clicked.