Hello, World

June 20, 2026 · Dustin Mierau

Welcome to dustin.os — a personal website shaped like a little operating system. There’s no scroll-jacking marquee here, no hero section. Just a desktop, a couple of windows, and a hard drive you can poke around in.

Why a desktop?

I grew up on black-and-white Macs, and there’s something about that world I never quite shook: the crisp one-pixel borders, the satisfying click of a window coming forward, the idea that software was a place you visited rather than a feed that scrolled past you.

This site is my attempt to rebuild a bit of that feeling with modern parts:

• Windows you can drag, zoom, and stack.
• A Finder for browsing photos and posts.
• A tiny app SDK, so I can drop in new toys whenever I like.

The best interfaces feel like rooms you can walk around in.

How it’s built

Everything is a static site (Astro), so it loads fast and hosts anywhere. The OS itself is a few hundred lines of plain TypeScript — a kernel, a window manager, and a handful of apps. No framework, no virtual DOM.

defineApp({
  id: 'hello',
  name: 'Hello',
  mount(ctx) {
    ctx.viewport.textContent = 'Drawing into my own window.';
  },
});

Open the Blog folder for more, or go dig through Photos. Make yourself at home.