September 11, 2026
Around 2023, I felt like doing some homework to do some catch up CS studies, especially about operating systems. Probably that was because I got a visionOS job at Apple. Remembering what my CS friends were telling me back in the days, I decided to go through Pintos by myself.
I can't make the repository public since that is probably not what the people who made Pintos wants, but it was a pretty delightful experience. Full of moments that corrected my mental model of things, and as usual, things that I took for granted are much more complicated than I thought and actually are based on whole bunch of design choices. It is just usually done so well, I don't need to think about it most of the times. Quite hard to believe things like virtual memory or pointer authentication are running in every computer as if there is no extra cost.
Encouraged by this expereince, I also went through BusTub. This one was new to me, but I was looking for another very well structured CS homework, and I found this BusTub, a DB homework project. This one actually led to have even more mental model corrections than Pintos, probably due to having less experience with using databases than writing code that makes devices go on fire. How far databases go to handle concurrency and how all the data in the world is running on top of these things as if they are trivial is kind of insane.
Again, not sharing the repository public. Actually for BusTub, there is a clear warning sign saying don't make your homework public. So, you will have to again trust me I have done this.