Paulo Cuambe

I don't want to be a spectator

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The ENIAC was designed and built while my grandfather was still a young man running through the woods of Inhambane.

Rockets landed on the moon a few years before my father and mother came into this world.

The internet was created before my father and mother met.

The dotcom era started right around the time my father and mother had their 3rd child.

All of this was way before I was born. I was welcomed into a magnificent world, built by giants to whom we are all indebted. They never saw the full impact of the work of their lives.

Educated to use, not to create

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently decided to write my own operating system. This is the hardest project I’ve ever attempted, and it has made me question what my education prepared me for.

The first step in the journey of writing an OS is getting the computer to load your code and display some text on the screen. That alone is hard. Before you can make any meaningful progress, you need to understand computer architecture, hardware, compilers, linkers, assembly, memory and all the glue in between the hardware and software layers. Hardware specs and ISA manuals will be part of your day – those docs alone have thousands of pages.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Paulo Cuambe.

I work with software and enjoy understanding how computers work.

I study the works of great scientists of the past, mainly those related to computer science in any way.

I will leave you with this quote by David MacMillan - Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021:

We fail much more than we ever succeeed. We know that. We accept that. We are amazing at dealing with failure. That’s what scientists do.