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I've watched many of your videos and love your approach to building complex features, building the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths. Howev

I've watched many of your videos and love your approach to building complex features, building the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths. However I'd love to see how you got started, the first early (before gui) steps of the kernel. Is that documented? The earliest git checkin I found was already a pretty capable os. Huge congrats on building such a positive community by the way.

cxr 5y ago
> love your approach to building complex features, building the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths Write code top-down <https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-down.html https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-...>: > With bottom-up design you start with the components [...] Designing a component is a small tractable task that can be finished and called _done_. You’re creating a perfect, beautiful, reusable jewel. All engineers really want to _do_ is write components. [...] At every level there's pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have _right now_.
- jnsie 5y ago
  I prefer middle-out myself...
akling 5y ago
I wasn't recording anything until ~6 months into the project. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have! There's a bit of history about early development here: https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/ https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/ Also, one of my earliest videos was showcasing some pre-YouTube builds of SerenityOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveS_vwp0y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveS_vwp0y8
- tails4e 5y ago
  Thanks, that was a great read and watch. The progress made over a few weeks was immense. I didn't know about computron until you mentioned it in the video, so I have to ask, would serenity run under computtron? If so, could a serenity port of computron run serenity in serenity?

cxr 5y ago

> love your approach to building complex features, building the skeleton first with asserts for uimplemeted code paths Write code top-down <https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-down.html https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-...>: > With bottom-up design you start with the components [...] Designing a component is a small tractable task that can be finished and called _done_. You’re creating a perfect, beautiful, reusable jewel. All engineers really want to _do_ is write components. [...] At every level there's pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have _right now_.

jnsie 5y ago
I prefer middle-out myself...

akling 5y ago

I wasn't recording anything until ~6 months into the project. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have! There's a bit of history about early development here: https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/ https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/ Also, one of my earliest videos was showcasing some pre-YouTube builds of SerenityOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveS_vwp0y8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveS_vwp0y8

tails4e 5y ago
Thanks, that was a great read and watch. The progress made over a few weeks was immense. I didn't know about computron until you mentioned it in the video, so I have to ask, would serenity run under computtron? If so, could a serenity port of computron run serenity in serenity?