alt Hacker NewsLearning about Bufferbloat in my undergrad, but more importantly that by running OpenWrt on my €20 home router and simply activating an (at the time) nonstandard queueing policy could make a shared internet connection infinitely more usable, blew my mind.
I never met him, but from what I saw on the relevant mailing lists, Dave was at the center of it all. Rest in peace.
Cable modems 15 years ago were really terrible. Instead of trusting TCP to do the right thing, the modems buffered the packets. This caused weird slowdowns if the uplink got congested a combination of large upstream packets and TCP acknowledgements. (Think backing up a computer to a server, etc)
To fix it, I had a box that was set to limit 90% of the traffic to the advertised cable services uplink speed and moved small packets (TCP ACKS) to the head of the line. Then once the upstream limit had been reached packets were dropped.
It's quite a bit easier now, but wondershaper really made the internet that much better back then.