@noracodes as someone who is really not a programmer but very definitely something resembling a network engineer, the way you've defined the audience here is breaking my brain a little bit

I guess I see the idea behind using "programmer" as the catch-all term to refer to people who work or tinker with IT, but at the same time this feels like a very familiar type of, uh, "IT erasure" (I last had to explain I do not write code despite studying IT to someone last week)

@tupsu @noracodes heh, you've reminded me of how at my first internship my boss was an EE who was definitely programming with ladder logic, but knew just the smallest scraps of python and java

very cool guy, much more of a generalist than i ever was. i should reach back out to him.

@jyn @noracodes oh yeah. similarly, my ex is a sweng who in the past 5 years has ended up programming Rust in embedded systems and bare metal, and it's been really insightful to watch how over time they've had to start taking the physical aspects of computing into account in their work more and more

meanwhile, coming from a background of networks and electronics, it feels like I'm much more used to having to consider the laws of physics as part of my work

@jyn hmm, well, they were put on that path by outside influence - they work at a university and were looking for a new project with the only requirement being that they can write Rust. there happened to be a SoC development project where there was interest in testing Rust as part of the ecosystem

they do also run a course around starting out in bare metal with Rust - I'm not sure if I can share full materials, but I can definitely share the recommended resources if you're interested!

@jyn sorry it took me a while to get back to you, but here's a heap of links:
https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-rust - the "masterlist" of embedded resources, many of these are probably linked there
https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/nomicon/
https://docs.rust-embedded.org/embedonomicon/
https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support.html
https://blog.japaric.io/brave-new-io/
https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2020/09/21/insights-from-writing-an-embedded-iot-app-almost-entirely-in-rust/
https://therealprof.github.io/blog/interrupt-comparison/
https://blog.eldruin.com/tips-hobby-embedded-development-beginners/ - tips on the physical side!

some suggested videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ev3xTDEhtw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTh6Bu_0OM

@jyn The character limit is tripping me up badly here, if I had more free time I'd probably make a blog post for these as well.

I agree with the other person who replied to you in that the best way to get into all this is to just get some basic device/kit and start playing with it. Arduinos are the most popular and hence have great resources. We've used Longan Nanos because RISC-V is cool, they're also very cheap and there's a support crate for it: https://github.com/riscv-rust/longan-nano