For someone who has heard about Andreas and SerenityOS on occasion but has never actually seen one of his livestreams, where do you suggest I start? Any special episode recommendations? Don’t see myself catching up with all of his videos, haha.
You don`t have to "catch up" per se. You will get into it by just watching some bits here and there.
Open his youtube channel [0] and pick a video that has a title that seems interesting.
If you want to get the latest about SerenityOS, he does this "Office Hours" thing live every friday. Which might be the answer you are looking for.
I had never seen any of his videos, nor followed SerenityOS. Regardless, I found this one "Browser hacking: A most satisfying refactor to hide constructors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5799GySdWqY interesting and relateable enough to watch to the end.
I've never had time to watch the YTs, I just recall them being "I build a filesystem in 45 minutes" or something like that, where the resulting code can't possibly be anything close to a production OS with all the error codes and wrinkles properly handled, to say nothing of documentation and test batteries.
Is Serenity OS a bunch of parlor tricks, and is it a UNIX reimpl, or is there anything interesting in the underlying OS design (micro vs macrokernel, userspace vs kernelspace, everything-is-a-file-Plan9, shell design, etc)?
the videos are all fairly self contained. usually limited to trying to fix a specific bug, or implement a specific feature. the livestreams are just q&a, focused on (but not exclusive to) technical questions.
just pick something that sounds interesting, basically. there's no need to have watched prior videos to understand what's going on, generally. Either way, most of the code encountered in the video will mostly have been written without being recorded