skylib

Long-form interactive explanations of how machines actually work. Everything on these pages was produced by running it — the house rule of the family is that nothing is recalled from memory.

• Descent & Return

  Five lines of Python followed all the way down through the interpreter, the kernel and the silicon, and back out to the pixels.

  cs-explainers/descent-and-return.html

• Two States

  Binary, hexadecimal and bytes, built up from the single trick underneath all of them: a thing that can be in exactly two states.

  cs-explainers/two-states.html

• The Box and the Address

  A first lesson in C, held together by the distinction the language forces on you: what a value is, and where it lives.

  cs-explainers/the-box-and-the-address.html

• The Shell Reads First

  Bash and the Linux command line, from your first ls to a script you would trust — built on the one thing the shell does to every line before any program runs.

  cs-explainers/the-shell-reads-first.html

• From Byte to Grapheme

  Unicode, taken one layer at a time — because "a character" is five different things stacked on each other, and every tool you own silently picks one of them.

  cs-explainers/from-byte-to-grapheme.html

• The Number That Isn't There

  Floating point, decoded to the bit — because 0.1 is not stored, and every float you have ever printed was a polite fiction agreed between the storer and the printer.

  cs-explainers/the-number-that-isnt-there.html

• The Name Computed from the Thing

  Hashing, followed up the stack until it turns into git — because a name can be computed from the thing it names, and a store whose addresses are identities cannot quietly lose anything it holds.

  cs-explainers/the-name-computed-from-the-thing.html

• The Hour That Happened Twice

  Time, from the instant to the string it prints as — because "what time is it" has no single answer, and every join in the stack that produces one throws something away.

  cs-explainers/the-hour-that-happened-twice.html

This section carries its own authoring system — a written spec, a starter skeleton and a structural validator — so new pages stay consistent with the eight above. cs-explainers/house-style.md · skeleton.html · validate.py

Reference guides: long, numbered and returned to rather than read through. Each one is a hub page plus its chapters, and each states how every factual claim on it is warranted — run, cited, or marked as field judgment.

• Power Platform app design

  Dataverse, model-driven apps and automation, for teams shipping through pipelines. Ten chapters, ordered so that the data model comes before its packaging, its packaging before its projections, and ALM last because it holds the rest together.

  guides/power-platform/index.html

This section carries its own authoring system too, and a different one — its own voice, its own palette, its own checker — because a reference guide is not an explainer and should not read like one. guides/power-platform/house-style.md · CLAUDE.md · check.py · skeleton.html