I've been noticing that without any specialization development can become repetitive, as in, a bunch of fancy ways of doing the same CURD operations.

Something that just calls me is low level development, wether it is embedded development (microcontrollers and such) or Linux Kernel and device drivers. I've been polishing my C skills for a while now and started to look into kernel development and uff, is it overwhelming!

I just wanted to see if some of you guys are or had experience in system development and how you got there. Thx!

I've been interested in how shit really works; a large part of my final thesis was assembly. That got me into my first job, a massive codebase in Z80 assembly. From there, I went into RTOS and stuff.

These days, I'm programming controllers also without operating system or HAL. Just as per the datasheet and the external schematics for the rest of the device. An oscilloscope can make a great debugger.

@Fast-Nop That's from a degree in EE or CS?

I did some PIC assembly and it was a "fast nop" for me (😂 sorry for the pun, couldn't help myself!)

from there I have done some C on ST32 and AVR8 but nothing I could consider professional, mostly hobby, but now I wanna go deeper, but being a self-taught dev it seems almost, if not, impossible to find a job that would even look at my application for embedded or RTOS (I read a lot of the documentation for FreeRTOS and was in love with it!)...

I think that open source development, Linux Kernel or device drivers might be easier to get into because is based more on what you have done than what degree you have... right?

@benj I have an EE degree like most of my colleagues, which is useful when working that close to the hardware. CS folks seem to be a bit rare in embedded, and then rather those who make the various RTOS, or in full-blown OS like Linux. But they seem to dislike reading hardware datasheets and schematics.

Linux dev these days is 90% paid guns, so that's professionalised, too - and from what I've heard, that community is somewhat rough. But the source is there, of course.