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.
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.
Something I’ve learned through my streaming project is that you don’t even need to be super “successful” at what you’re doing to build an audience of people that are excited for you and want to support you.
Based on my experience, you just need to be:
trying hard
at something hard
consistently
in public
I wouldn’t say I’ve been so “successful” at building an OS. It currently doesn’t even really boot or do anything yet. It does not support running programs at all. All it can do is kind of initialize the hardware and slowly initialize itself to the point where it’s almost ready to run programs. (And I didn’t even write a lot of that code. A lot of it was provided by the base foundation for the course I’m following.)
And none of that matters. People are still excited about what I’m doing, even though it’s not novel in the slightest, and I’m not that “successful”. What matters is simply that I’ve been trying, a lot, and talking about it.
I’ve been live-streaming weekly for six months now, and I’ve noticed a virtuous flywheel develop.
Publicly committing to doing this activity creates pressure to follow through and do it
The more I do it, the more of a streak develops
The more the streak that develops, the more I want to keep it up and not break it (Especially if I’m very public about the streak)
The more I want to keep it up and not break it, the more I prioritize it
The more I prioritize it, the more importance it gets in my schedule, and other things are scheduled around it
This has been a powerful cycle to harness because the activity (learning OS development) is deeply aligned with my interests and aspirations — so I’ve effectively designed a system that provides positive pressure towards doing something good for me.
I’ve been streaming myself doing basic OS hacking for 12 weeks now. Here’s a reflection & some things I’ve learned:
I’ve gotten compliments on my audio quality – good to know that my mic setup is good.
I got negative feedback that my screen size was too small – I took action and now stream at 720p which seems comically large to me, but produces a more readable video.
I got a positive comment on how relaxed I was.
I got miscellaneous positivity and encouragement from people, wishing me well for my OS, even though I think it’s unlikely they really watched the whole thing or grasp how wildly far I am away from anything significant.
Performance varies from ~70 views on a video to 1.6k. Live streams tend to do better than pre-recorded videos. I believe also posting about it on Twitter helps.
I got one chat comment from a person really excited about gardening specifically, and followed specifically because I used this phrasing.
I have a couple people that are interested and follow fairly closely – shoutout to l1zard and arash11!
I have 10 people in my Discord despite not publicizing it. l1zard and Glenford Williams are the most active.
It seems to not really matter that I’m not doing any serious OS dev, or that I was doing boring stuff like working on the build system. Some people were still interested even though I was doing possibly the most boring tasks possible.
I slightly regret spending so long doing random Makefile and build system refactors which in retrospect were a bit of a waste of time. But in the end, taking any action at all was the most important thing, and now I have something in motion and can course correct. I already course corrected by quitting the build system and moving to working on C refactors. I might course correct again and entirely switch to JOS which has much better foundational build infrastructure etc, and is also much more minimal – leaving much more work for me to actually do, including accessible beginner projects. It might be worth simply trying the JOS assignments rather than randomly hacking around at will.
I’ve had a lot more growth than I would have thought: going from 300 to 700 subscribers, and > 1k views on some videos. There are a lot of reasons to think this wouldn’t have achieved those results:
It’s long, unedited, and the value in it is very sparse
I was just working on the build system, not really doing anything interesting
My font size was way too small for most streams
I stream on Sundays when people are plausibly out doing things (but on the other hand, maybe they’re relaxing inside)
(This is a random collection of thoughts around my new operating systems project, “gardenOS”.)
What’s up with the “gardening” terminology?
This is a phrase that I feel perfectly describes the ethos of this project. In the same way people have gardens as calm places to express themselves, learn things, and have fun doing work, I want to create an analogous place for exploring my interest in operating systems.
Some key tenants of the approach:
No stress
Have fun
Pursue whatever interests you
I don’t have particularly strong OSdev skills at the moment, so I’m especially focusing on doing small, easy tasks, such as cleaning up the build system. I do this in the same way you might spend an afternoon picking weeds in your little garden. It’s easy, well understood, not too complicated, no large decisions to be made — and it concretely improves the project. It’s a concrete win you can lock in, in a fixed amount of time, with fairly little work.
Disclaimer: I’m almost apprehensive to even give this project a name
I’m worried that even naming this project (“gardenOS”) will put too much pressure on me. I am deeply aware that OS’s take monumental amounts of time and energy to even get to basic states. And at my current rate (~2 hours a week), it’s unlikely we will get to even basic levels soon.
I wasn’t expecting things to get this philosophical this quickly. My focus above all, is to have fun, learn things, and make some small progress each week in the stream. Each week where I do a stream or do some work, any any of that happens, is a win.
I explicitly hold very few expectations around a future “goal” of the project or where I want it to end up. I just want to have fun and learn things about operating systems.
The loose vision I have is to create a minimal OS for play and experimentation. It should be a high quality codebase, and I should work on it as if I wanted to present my best self as an aspiring pro systems programmer.
The ethos of the project
Even though the project is in a maximally nascent stage, I already feel a certain ethos evolving. In the project, we emphasize:
Relaxed, casual, kind attitude
Learning mindset
Ambition to use programming best practices, and aspiring to become pro systems programmers
Portray an accurate “slice of life” of systems programming. Meaning: Show the day to day, which is not always thrilling tasks (like adding a syscall), but simply just working on the build system or refactoring some code.
My experience after doing four streams
I’ve done four streams so far (2 live, 2 recorded). My big worries are that I’ll run out of stuff to do and have to scramble to find something to do, live.
This has never happened — I’m always surprised at the adventures “we” find ourselves going on
The use of “we”
The project is just me at the moment, but there’s something about using “we” to describe it that makes me feel good.
It’s not just to make myself seem more impressive, or feel less alone. When I use it, I think of the handful of enthusiastic people that have joined me in the live streams, or left comments with questions or encouragement.
Even in these earliest of days, there is some tiny, microscopic community feel forming. So when I say “we”, I speak for this community.
