Geek creed

Have you guys ever built your own OS or Compiler?

This schizophrenic templeOS guy was spamming /r9k/, and i started to think, what am i doing worrying about nogf when i haven't even accomplished the ultimate geek mission?

Most engineers i've met at a major telecom company have done this, or both.. and had it run on hardware they soldered togheter themselves back before there was standardized motherboards.

I have no excuse, other that im lazy, stupid, and certainly not a wizzkid.
But how about you guys?

>>1
I think I'm of a minority opinion, but I do have the following strong credentials:

-Never hospitalized for mental illness

I would say that unless you have a reason to write an OS or a compiler you're wasting your time.  Being able to do that is good, but why not find some new problem and solve it?  Everyone knows that OSes and compilers can be written.  A real accomplishment would be going out on the frontier and writing something new.  A lot more is now possible in machine learning, for example.  If write a compiler you must, why not write one that simplifies use of the GPU when running code?  That would be a bigger accomplishment, and actually useful.  (Actually, such things exist, but are still primitive.)