The machine under the design
Design work used to end at the mockup. More and more it ends at something that runs: a prototype in real code, a site that ships without a handoff. That brings the machine underneath into the designer's work: where code runs, what a server does, why a page is slow, how a site gets broken into.
These notes take it apart one question at a time, starting from what designers actually run into, for anyone who was never told what is underneath.
So far
- 23 Oct 2026What actually runs my code?
A bug in PHP let attackers into sites whose own code had no flaws. Making sense of that takes three layers, engine, harness and environment, and they explain far more than PHP.
- 18 Sept 2026What happens when I press play in Stremio?
Three things in two places: the app and its server on your Mac, the addon somewhere else. The player never sees a torrent, only an address on your own machine.
- 5 Sept 2026Why does thinking harder cost more?
Thinking longer means more tokens, each token is a trip through the whole model, and every step of it is a switch flipping. The bill counts the flips.
- 19 Aug 2026What is a script, and what is a branch?
A script is text that names the program to read it. A terminal session can outlive its window. A branch is a name, not a folder. Each time, what you see is a view of something kept somewhere else.
- 16 Aug 2026What happens when a program runs?
Typing one word starts a chain that runs from a program on your machine to a model on someone else's, then down through memory and the processor to switches, and back out as light on the screen.
- 28 Jul 2026How does code reach what it needs?
A page needs data and a coding agent needs tools. In both, where the code runs decides what it may reach, and where a file sits decides who gets it.
- 14 Jun 2026What does Next.js do with my code?
npm run dev turned out to mean next dev, a server that lives inside the project. From there: what gets built ahead of time, who makes the HTML and when, and why only some of a page's code reaches the browser.
- 8 Jun 2026What is actually in Bun?
Bun is called a runtime and a bundler at once, so where is the file for each? Looking for them showed that npm isn't Node, that the engine is one part of a browser, and that Docker's answer is to ship the files with the code.
- 19 May 2026How does my terminal find a tool?
Is Bun in /bin? No. The answer runs through one variable, a startup file and a tree of folders older than the Mac, and under all of them a kernel that started the shell in the first place.
58 terms defined once and shared between them