Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?

Maybe side-step into the most fun hobby in low-level computing: OS development.

https://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

It will give you a much more holistic view of computers-as-hardware and the low-level intricacies, that are in my opinion more useful and more foundational than just being good at optimising a hot-loop.

I did it in my teenage years, and it's my first true and only love. Now almost 20 years later I'm back at it, this time with all the accumulated experience in software engineering. There is nothing quite like it. Any basic, trite design (i.e. the usual POSIX clone) will teach you a great deal about the entire stack.

This is really the key. Grinding something you don't actually enjoy or find useful is pretty deathly, even if you get actively paid for it. "Low level", as others have said, is a very, very broad field and if you have an general interest in lower-level stuff, home in on what specifically interests you by trying to achieve some actual goal of use or interest to you.

It doesn't really matter what it is, it could be porting FeeeRTOS to your toaster, writing a kernel driver for something, reversing some device protocol, implementing something on an FPGA or building some embedded device or hacking another one into something else. Just get stuck into something and feel the gravity of your open interests.

Nothing you learn along the way will be a waste.

Not so sure about you being behind me - one minute ago I had little to no idea what I2C or SPI even mean :)

It seems that I've been on a right track in some sense - I stumbled upon Handmade Network a few weeks ago!