For reverse engineering, I highly recommend learning burp suite. (This is a bit like saying "Just learn vim!" in terms of learning curve, since the curve is basically a wall, but it's well worth it.)
E.g. I was curious how TPUs actually work -- the low-level protocol, built on protobufs. But burp suite is only good for analyzing HTTP. No worries, a couple plugins later and I was good to go: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1315638127772405761
You'd be shocked the amount of information you get when you merely look at the traffic. Chrome devtools is nice, of course, but it's not an intercepting proxy; you can't (easily) capture every request, modify it, replay it, see how the webserver responds to malformed input, etc. Burp repeater makes all of that super easy.
Unfortunately the power is hidden behind a rather unfriendly UI, with some unfriendly defaults (the very first thing everyone wonders is, "why did burp cause my website to freeze?" answer: it starts up in intercept mode, so that's actually a sign that things are working; but you have to turn off intercept mode to actually get it to do useful things / see a bunch of requests).
E.g. I was curious how TPUs actually work -- the low-level protocol, built on protobufs. But burp suite is only good for analyzing HTTP. No worries, a couple plugins later and I was good to go: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1315638127772405761
You'd be shocked the amount of information you get when you merely look at the traffic. Chrome devtools is nice, of course, but it's not an intercepting proxy; you can't (easily) capture every request, modify it, replay it, see how the webserver responds to malformed input, etc. Burp repeater makes all of that super easy.
Unfortunately the power is hidden behind a rather unfriendly UI, with some unfriendly defaults (the very first thing everyone wonders is, "why did burp cause my website to freeze?" answer: it starts up in intercept mode, so that's actually a sign that things are working; but you have to turn off intercept mode to actually get it to do useful things / see a bunch of requests).
Emacs users might feel at home, at least. :)