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ceidsnesson Ask HN: What should a systems/low-level software engineer know?

Linux Device Drivers 3rd Edition is a bit dated but is still a wonderful introduction to systems programming in C. It's for Linux, but it presents information that is useful when working with any system.

Low-level systems programming is hard and can be a bit boring at times. I agree that debugging is very different from debugging on higher level systems. Most of the time an oscilloscope or an LED is the best debugging tool. Also, in well written low level code you tend to have more code making sure that everything is okay than you have actually doing stuff, which can be tedious. It takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy it.

ceidsnesson Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

You can also share Keep cards with other people's Gmail accounts.

ceidsnesson Porting Alpine Linux to RISC-V

Yes, that's exactly it. A lot of source packages expect to be build on the same system they will run on.

ceidsnesson Ask HN: Are you doing async programming with Python?

Yes, we are using it to build a set of system configuration and monitoring daemons, controlled through D-Bus.

It's okay, it can be a a little confusing at first but worth the time investment required to understand it. The API has been improved with all of the recent 3.x dot releases. The new run command in 3.7 should make it a lot easier for folks to get started.