[hivacruz]

I feel you. Sometimes I browse projects on GitHub and I'm astonished by what people can do and I can't. Example, OpenCore[0], a famous bootloader in the Hackintosh scene. How can people even start to code this.. Awewome work, awesome people.

[0]: https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg

[sho_hn]

Preface: I can't do this (specifically). But I have done many types of software development across two decades. My journey began with LAMP-style web work, took me to C++ and the desktop (apps, GUI toolkits, browser engines), then to embedded - from smart TVs to smart speakers, to network protocols for drone systems and beefy car infotainment ECUs and lower-level microcontroller/borderline electronics work.

My conclusion: You can get into just about anything, and for the most part the difficulty level is fairly uniform. But there's simply a vast sea of domain-specific spec knowledge out there. It doesn't mean that it's too hard for you or you can't learn it. Anything that is done at scale will fundamentally be approachable by most developers. Just be prepared you'll need to put in the time to acquire a familiarity with the local standards/specs and ways of doing things. Knowledge turns seemingly hard things into easy things, and if it's been done before chances are it's documented somewhere.

The truly hard stuff is innovating/doing things that haven't been done before. Novel development happens rarely.

[bartvk]

Yeah, this is my conclusion too. I moved from the Oracle platform to embedded, scientific stuff like reading out custom electronics for IR cameras. And now I'm into iOS apps. It's more a question of what part of the stack feels interesting and doable to you, at a certain period in your professional life.

[cmurf]

>acquire a familiarity with the local standards/specs

And with the bugs. Especially with bootloaders because you're in a preboot environment.

[secondaryacct]

I ve done a bittorrent client, a 3D rendering engine on the PS3 and a printer driver for fun and while clearly not at the levels of a bootloader, I can have a few cookie points in interview for originality.

What I learned starting these daunting task (especially the ps3 which was closed specs), is that it s still done by humans and following familiar patterns. Most of the time you bang your head against unclear doc or go through successive layers of abstraction (to do a ps3 rendering engine, better know your basic openGL on PC, which is only possible if you know matrix and vector geometry) but EVERYTHING is possible to reach at a workable level (expert level I feel comes with money incentive, team mates and repetition). I spent 2 years on japanese, 3 hours a day, and could integrate the meaning of Haikus at the end.

I think the only true talent you must have is insane stubborness. To go through, a doc at a time. Usually after the first insane challenge (for me: learning english at a near native level, reading literature or discussing politics) of your life, you understand it s all pretty much time investment.

[sauntheninja]

Did you use PSLIght SDK to develop the rendering engine on the PS3?

[gitgud]

It can be daunting to look at a popular project in it's current state. Thankfully with Open Source Projects you can go back in time and see how the code evolved.

Here's [1] the first few commits to OpenCore. Much more approachable and inspiring.

[1] https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/commits/master?af...