Firmware Foundational Concepts
Firmware Development: Foundational Concepts is a concise, beginner-friendly crash course that explains how firmware development actually works, beyond tutorials and copy-paste code.
Originally written as a 7-day email course, this guide walks you through the core mental models every embedded engineer needs to understand: hardware vs firmware roles, bare-metal vs RTOS vs Linux, build systems, workflow, testing, debugging, and how real embedded projects balance planning with change.
This is not a step-by-step coding tutorial.
It’s a conceptual map that helps you understand why things are done the way they are in professional firmware development, so you stop feeling lost when projects grow beyond “blinky” examples.
If you’re early in your embedded journey (or self-taught and missing the big picture), this guide will give you the foundation most engineers learn the hard way.