Why does this Blog address an answer to a random question where the answer is 42?

It started on a normal day at work. Texting some colleagues about a topic. One of them replied “42”. A bit surprised how he came up with that answer. The answer was totally not inline with the question. I held back by not replying at all. Thinking… “Have I missed something?”, “I don’t want to look like a fool replying that I don’t get it”. Some minutes passed and I decided to respond with another question on his answer, joking a bit about his age. Then I got a response.

“It’s the answer to everything”

Ok, it was time to Google it. How could I’ve missed something important like this, I thought. The most important answer to any question in the world and I’ve missed it. The results on Google where baffling. How could so much people talk about this topic and where does it come from? Even the explanations on this answer seemed very thought-through and investigated. I decided to check the source of this question and answer and stumbled on a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I decided to watch the 2005 released movie. And there it was, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. I’ve never laughed so much in a movie. It’s full of humor and silly references. I’m not going to spoil it if you haven’t seen the movie yet. Please watch it and enjoy.

a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Now, the number 42. I’m a Network Engineer and we tend to convert everything to something that is related to protocols, binary, hexadecimal, RFC’s, etc. Converting the number to binary resulted a clean looking pattern.

42 = 1010101

And hence, this domain was born. Not the only domain-name around like this, but it felt unique and related to my work because of the .network domain suffix.