Whenever I come across a thick client (read this term here), I spend time with it in DevTools, no particular agenda, just trying to understand how it is built from the outside.

The things I usually try to get a read on are what framework the product is built on, whether it is a SPA or SSR or some combination of the two, how long lists are rendered, how sockets are structured, how they handle pagination or infinite scrolling, and what the payloads and response structures look like.

Sometimes DevTools shows you something peculiar and the investigation takes on a life of its own. The following are the two times that happened.