Binary to Emoji: What does 140 characters even mean?

Good coders are lazy. Meaning that they do work up front to prevent needing to do way more work later.
Not bothering to understand how character encoding works has lead to some of the most difficult, arduous programming conundrum's I've ever seen.

We'll have fun in this class. We'll learn about:

• How contemplating light switches led to the information revolution
• How font aficionados got their fix before the screen was invented
• How filling a tweet with emojis costs Twitter 4x more than your other tweets

And through it, we'll learn

• What that "charset" meta tag means, and why you always put at the top of your html
• How to make good choices when setting up your databases
• Why “smart quotes” and other characters sometimes show up as gobbledegook on websites, and how to analyze and fix the problem
• Just enough binary to achieve complete command line mastery
• About the wonderful world of Unicode and font-based icon sets, which are superior to images when making resolution-proof designs