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putting-the-you-in-cpu
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Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself.
I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Apparently everything online about how operating systems and CPUs work is terrible. There are, like, no resources. Everything sucks. So while I was teaching myself I realized, hey, I should make a really good resource myself. So I started taking notes on what I was learning, and ended up with a 60-page Google Doc. And then I started writing.
And while I was writing, it turned out that most of the stuff in that giant doc was wrong. And I had to do more research. And I iterated and iterated and iterated and the internet resources continued to be terrible so I needed to make the article better. Then I realized it needed diagrams and drawings, but I didn't know how to do art, so I just pulled out Figma and started experimenting. I had a Wacom tablet lying around that I won at some hackathon, so I used that to draw some things.
Now, about 3 months later, I have something I'm really proud of! I'm happy to finally share the final version of Putting the "You" in CPU. I built this as part of Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), which is a community of other high schoolers who love computers.
It was cool seeing some (accidental) reception on HN a couple weeks ago while this was still a WIP, I really appreciated the feedback I got. I took some time to substantially clean it up and I'm finally happy to share with the world myself.
The website is a static HTML/CSS project, I wrote everything from scratch (I'm especially proud of the navigation components).
I hope you enjoy and learn something!
Have a look at this one! It was still in development when I went, looks like they have a PDF now. https://github.com/illinois-cs241/coursebook
