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Comment by akling | Hacker News Reader

Hi Crinus! As you might guess, I've spent a large percentage of my free time over the last year on this.

Early on, I was unemployed and living alone, so I was putting 8+ hours a day into it, every day of the week. Progress was very swift.

Over time I've scaled it down as I've moved to a new place, rejoined civilization and started a job. Nowadays I'd say I'm doing 3-4 hours on weekdays and 6-8 on weekends.

I regularly record screencasts of my work and post it to YouTube. I find that it works amazingly well for staying focused and serious, sometimes I end up solving something I would like to give up on, simply because I don't want to abandon a video I've started recording :)

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Yeah, one of my "plans" was to just wait until i'm between jobs again :-P.

I had't thought about using YouTube to help with focus. Though i wonder if it'll also "help" with making things feel more like work than fun :-P

I am curious - what motivates you and drives you to contribute so much to this?

I have been having a hard time motivating myself to do anything really

It's a blend of a couple things.

First off, it's really fun(!) and I'm learning a ton of things about software, hardware and even a little bit about people from working with the contributors who want to help out.

Secondly, I'm building an operating system that I want to use. The contemporary OS'es don't really appeal to me anymore, for one reason or another. I realized that if I just focus for a long time, I could probably build a replacement that looks and works exactly the way I would like instead. So that's what I've been doing.

Thirdly, it keeps me sane. I've had some serious problems with addiction in the past, and having something meaningful to dump all of my excess time, energy and attention into, instead of drugs, has dramatically improved my life over the last year. :)

What resources did you use to learn how to build something like this?

My previous pet project (for 15+ years) was an x86 PC emulator, so I had a very good understanding of IA32 and how an x86 operating system works, since I had written a CPU that could run many of them. I just never wrote my own.

With that knowledge, it was pretty straightforward to bring up my own little system. The rest of it comes from my experience in C++ systems programming which I've learned on the job while working on KDE, Qt and WebKit over the last ~15 years.

It's a bit hard to explain how it feels, but I'm building this system "from memory" much of the time. Visually, I'm recreating what I thought were the most beautiful things I've seen in computer interfaces. Architecturally, I'm building the best "Unix" that I can, while making use of modern C++ and other recent concepts like JSON, etc.

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