Monthly Archives: October 2024

Learning kernel development on hard mode

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: _Micropost 🍪, Streaming

When I started self-studying kernel development via MIT 6.828 (2018)’s open source materials (JOS OS), I thought I was making my life easier by not starting from scratch. Doing this allowed me to get going very quickly with a base skeleton for an OS, as well as a fully functioning build system and helper Makefile command for debugging with qemu.

That was great, but I’ve realized that there are also many ways I’m doing this on hard mode:

  • Doing it in only 2-3 hours a week
    • This is not really enough time to develop an OS, and is particularly hard for debugging, where it can be helpful to have significant context built up for longer sessions.
  • Live-streaming almost all of it
    • This can be very distracting and make me go at a slower pace than usual, since I try to engage with viewers and answer questons. On the other hand, explaining things helps solidify my understanding.
  • Working with a 6 year old code-base, but using a newer toolchain — which means fighting bitrot
    • There have been multiple cases where the codebase actually got in my way and produced very hard to debug bugs. Also, when I transition labs, it introduces a bunch of foreign code that I don’t understand. It can be difficult to tell if I truly have something broken, or if the new code is in an intermediate state that is meant to yield issues like crashes or assertion failures.

Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself

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: _Micropost 🍪, Blogging, Other, Streaming

In the past year I’ve effectively reinvented my public identity as a live-streamer. That wasn’t the goal initially, but it’s been one of the most fun journeys I’ve been on in a long time, and I’m glad I did it.

For many of the people discovering me now, that’s what they know me as, but what they don’t know is the 10+ years of public presence I had pre-streaming. Since 2012 or so, I’ve been on Twitter and blogging (to a lesser extent) as part of the tech & infosec scenes, sharing random projects I was working on, or things I learned about.

In 2019, I revamped my blog and wrote a few viral blog posts about Linux kernel internals. This was the start of reinventing myself as a blogger. Around that time I started posting a lot more on Twitter also.

And now in 2024, I’ve started streaming and funnily enough, that has had more traction for me than any other project I’ve had before. So I guess that makes me a streamer now — until the next self reinvention!

So, be careful of getting stuck in self identities that you’ve historically created, but don’t have intentional reasons to maintain. Don’t be afraid to try new things — even if they potentially reshape your entire identity.

Old tweets:

poet was a toy post exploitation RAT I developed for fun.