Boredom, the Meaning of Life, and OS Programming

When I was in high school, a friend told me I should take more care to enjoy my time here, as there would not be a more relaxed period in my life with more free time for me to do what I love. With some well-meaning contempt, I told him I would be devastated if I assumed this to be the peak moment of my life.

The below was my last full year of school (the one before leaving exams, they cut the second half of the year short). Beautiful, isn't it?

Now, this is what my last year of school looks like. You can see I prepared for leaving exams in April, worked on an open-source project during an internship in the summer, and started studying in September.

Ever since I started studying, my coding activity has stayed low.

How upsetting! Maybe my friend was right.

Well, no, I'm still convinced I didn't peak in high school. I am upset though about not getting to program much.

The first semester at ETH was genuinely challenging to me. I also spent a lot of energy outside of school, developing and changing as a person, so it's no surprise I had little free time or energy to spend on programming.

The pressure of the first semester has faded, though, ever since I passed the first block of exams with reasonable (larger than ever before) effort and acceptable grades.

Equipped with the knowledge of what is required to pass exams, I have been drifting through the first month of the new semester. University is still challenging intellectually, but it's much more manageable than last year, and it's taking me less time.

But still, I struggled to find the energy to work on my own projects again (and also eat well, do sports and have a social life). At the same time, I am bored with doing schoolwork all day, and I miss the joy and meaning I found in programming.

I started doing OS hacking right after I graduated from high school last year. I had done a lot of low-level programming before -- some OS stuff even -- but I hadn't seriously focused on OS programming.

At the time I figured I should learn more about (a) OS development and systems programming or (b) AI and machine learning. I was already leaning towards option (a) because I saw a lot of value in better understanding computer systems, and then someone came along and offered me to do an internship working on kernel code. I accepted.

In my free time, I began writing an x86_64 bootloader and them some more OS primitives. Working on this sporadically ever since, I now have a lot of the basic x86 stuff working (interrupts, paging, privileges), enough C primitives to be somewhat productive, allocators, an in-the-works RAM fs, the first syscalls, and some tiny drivers.

When I did focus on the project for a few weeks, I made progress quickly. OS development can be quite challenging, though, and I got stuck more than once, leading me to quit the project for a while and come back later.

I plan to work on this for the next few weeks. For accountability reasons, I want to document some progress here. It's fine if I decide to quit and do something else later, but I want to make a consistent effort to see where it leads first.

I will work on this in the mornings as the first thing of the day. This way I have the energy to do the work. It also makes me more energetic throughout the day, and I'm in a better mood, because I already did something fun and challenging.

There are many more projects to work on, but focus is key. From now on, I will spend a month on this project and only switch to something else thereafter. It's fine if I do switch, but my OS project is cool, and I want to give it a fair shot now that I'm more settled in at university.

Zurich is beautiful, by the way. Have a good day, friend.