Just like that author, many years ago, I went through the process of understanding the DEFLATE compression standard and producing a short and concise decompressor for gzip+DEFLATE. Here are the resources I published as a result of that exploration:

* https://www.nayuki.io/page/deflate-specification-v1-3-html

* https://www.nayuki.io/page/simple-deflate-decompressor

* https://github.com/nayuki/Simple-DEFLATE-decompressor