What makes you think he's incapable of getting through those twenty or thirty books? Did you have the experience to write an OS when you started your first OS? No, that's why you write your first OS. I think he knows what he's doing when he grabs the cat's tail.
Writing your own OS is not the problem here. My first one was actually bootstrapping Forth on an embedded system. Let's call that an OS if we are going to stretch things. It did involve writing a pile of drivers for I/O --parallel, serial, i2c, etc. It also involved designing and building my own floppy disk controller as well as programming the driver to run it. Then I had to write my own screen editor to be able to edit code on the little machine itself.
Did I know all of that stuff? Of course not. Did it compare in complexity to what this article is proposing. Nope. The OS described in the article is far, far more complex than what I just described.
Is is incapable of doing it? Nope. I did not say that. I think I said that anyone who has written a non-trivial RTOS would laugh at the idea of what he described. Why? Because it is a monumental job for one person, particularly if they've almost done zero real development at the embedded level and they also have to work for a living.
I got started designing my own microprocessor boards, bootstrapping them and writing assembly, Forth and C programs before when I was about 14 years old. By the time I got to college I knew low-level programming pretty well. As the challenge to start diving into writing real RTOS's presented itself I could devote every waking hour to the task. Someone starting as a web developer --who presumably still needs to keep working-- and wanting to develop such an extensive OS is just, well, let's just say it's hard.
