Ask HN: How do you get into systems programming

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Ask HN: How do you get into systems programming

Hi all!

I'm looking for recommendations on where to start with learning systems programming. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get to a point where I can make a living doing it, but currently I just want to do fun stuff to build up curiosity around it.

Here's all of the "low-level" stuff that I know so far / imagine being useful. I... - Have enough of an understanding of networking to write a toy HTTP server on top of TCP - Know enough C to write some basic terminal tools + window applications if needed (on Linux) - Love terminal tools like neovim + several core utils - Have dabbled with Arduino/ESP32 & communicating via USB over the serial port with a host pc - Am pretty decent with Python, and have been using it for like 10 years

Some things that I've been curious about in the past - Converting parts of python libraries from pure python to C/C++ bindings for better performance - Writing a terminal based file manager to work with Google Chrome - Actually contributing to chromium (my laptop is a potato though so all of my builds fail)

About me: I'm in my junior year of uni studying CS, and I've been able to make money doing web dev for the past 2 years of my degree. For many reasons including curiosity and the fact that AI makes me feel replaceable doing many frontend + backend tasks, though I'm very curious about getting into lower level programming.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Discussion 5 comments · 13 points · otherayden · 2025-04-28
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