Another cool thing about DNS - you only need the IP of a single root server to be able to get the nameservers, IPs and everything else to resolve any name in any TLD. The hierarchical nature of DNS is very neat to see in action. I built a toy DNS checker tool[0] while I was learning about it to get a more visual overview, and it ended up being one of my tools I still use every few days to verify a domain is properly delegated if I suspect it has issues.
Yup, that's me! The SA forums inspired a lot of my random side projects, the TF2 server integration stuff was especially fun (got me into reverse engineering Valve's game .so to fix bugs). I miss those days when I had all the free time in the world :).
[0] https://r-1.ch/r1dns/ (and yes it has a lot of bugs, don't break it :)).