[SSNLF]

I love this but just looking at the comments - while admittedly cool, implementing your own OS isn't black magic or particularly arcane knowledge; sure it's a whole lot of work where you're often reimplementing the wheel, but not outside the realm of any reasonably skilled graduate I would think.

[sph]

Writing an OS is not any harder than writing a database or a programming language. The complexity lies in how far do you want to go with it.

While not black-magic, dealing with hardware and its quirks is a different skillset than writing React logic. A bug might need a reboot, or in some rare cases with terrible hardware, turning it into a paperweight.

In fact, I believe that learning to write low-level code for simple hardware (say, an Arduino or a RP2040), is a smoother path for a complete newbie than learning the massively complex frontend world, and provides much better foundational knowledge.

[Dessesaf]

The really challenging part when you're building an OS comes from not building an incrementally bigger and bigger mess until you're stuck and can't make any progress any more.

You're right, there's no magic here. It's just lots and lots of work. And there are important decisions to be made about how you design and abstract everything. None of them are hard, but making so many decisions is the very thing that's hard about most programming.

The answer of course is to have lots of programming experience. Which is why building an actual OS to the level of SerenityOS is not something a reasonably skilled graduate would be able to do.