HTTP/3 in Practice: From SPDY to QUIC on My Home Router

I turned on HTTP/3 for a CloudFront distribution, saw the load times improve, and then did what I usually do when something works without me understanding why: I went looking for the packets. This post has three parts. First, how HTTP got here — because HTTP/3 makes very little sense without the twenty years of workarounds that preceded it. Second, the theory, kept short. Third, the practical part: enabling it on a CDN, then capturing real QUIC traffic on my OpenWrt router with tcpdump and reading what comes back.