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.