I once interviewed a smart guy from a certain UC across the bay. Still undergrad, he played a lot with Python and wished he could have something similar to pip when doing C/C++.
So he wrote himself a "package manager" that could fetch binaries, place header files correctly and add them to his build. Neat little project.
That's basically what this guy did. It reads a YAML file and exec() whatever build instruction is in there. The CS102 guy I hired could do it as well.
Keivan was brought in by Microsoft for an interview and he didn't get the job. He kept talking about how "he could have patented this" or how it was an "acquihire" but there's nothing new to acquire in there! I mean it's not like he invented package management (NuGet, Chocolatey, Scoop all predate his attempt).
But hey, he flunked his interview and got a lot of eyes on his startup thanks to some well placed clickbait on HN...