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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

Impressive, super cool, and inspiring!

Example of “creating something impressive in X days” requires a lot of experience and talent that is built over years.

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Versus now... I changed the text on a button with an internationalized string. It only took me about a week.

I put the English string in the catalog, updated a number of tests, run the tests on the local system, pushed the change to staging cluster, fix unanticipated test failures, push the change to production, contact the translators to have the string translated to a number of languages, and have documentation updated.

So... It goes to production before you get translations to all the languages?

In my case, the "production" does not really become visible to users right away. Perhaps, I should have called it "pre-production".

I suggest you use translation management tools, so the translator gets the strong as soon as you add it to the catalog.

Buy anyway there's no "then vs now" when you are really comparing "prototype" to "deliver to users". It took Unix decades to get those strings translated.

Also the creator of KnightOS, written entirely in Z80 assembly, more than 12 years ago!

https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/463/46387.htm...

holy shit. they're already a living legend but somehow i didn't make this connection

https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/27/KnightOS-was-interesting....

Sadly defunct. I guess the real OS was the syscalls we made along the way.

Drew is smart and his timeline is short but I think it’s the wrong way to look at it if you just put him on a pedestal for it. Making a UNIX clone is a typical undergrad project at most universities. Extending that to something that is complete is something that requires perseverance, not special genius.

I think it is a matter of how you are exposed to programming. I started with pascal at 9, and I wrote my first (VM-)bootable OS in junior high school (around the age of 14). Not as fancy as this of course, but it booted into an environment not unlike r4rs scheme - based on SIOD. A scheme error was handled but any C errors would immediately lead to a kernel panic.

I am not a programmer today, but I can still wrap most of my head around many low level concepts. I can't, however, write anything resembling a modern web page. Nor can I understand how any larger JS application works.

NachOS was developed at Berkeley and maintained at UW. Both are top-ranked CS programs. Undergraduates are expected to add features to the core OS e.g. virtual memory, not build it from scratch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Another_Completely_Heurist...

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/

... and also a previously kernel implementation called Helios to provide a lot of the lowest level code. Not trying to knock down the accomplishment, but DD is pretty open about the fact that a lot of the speed of this project was dependent on having done Helios first (and reusing code from it).

...which is part of the "experience and talent built over years", I guess? :-)

He only have Helios so he just integrated a few missing parts.

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