Ciro's word of caution for 2019 aspiring system programmers: Should you waste your life with systems programming?
This is basically a direct consequence of backward design.
The higher the level you can operate at, the better.
C is better than assembly, userland better than kernelland.
The ideal level to operate at, and one of humankind's greatest ambitions is "AGI, make me money", the highest possible level.
Only go down a level when it seems necessary.
Appears to be a small section from the Diamond Sutra. TODO find or create a video of it, it is just too awesome.
This is a good place to start your journey, though it misses a lot, and some songs are not as memorable as others, there is huge variability in that list.
Video 1.
The Ten Most Famous Melodies in Ancient China
. Source. A single video with a collage of all ten songs.
Operating system by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Magic software that allows you to write a single program that runs on a wide range of hardware.
Erhu by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
A blind erhu street performer playing in Jingzhou, Hubei (2006)
Source. Playing the erhu is a traditional occupation for blind people in China, a notable example being Abing.
Video 2.
The 12 Most Famous Erhu Melodies in China (2021)
Source. TODO transcribe list.
Bare metal by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Bare metal programming is to run a program without an operating system below it.
Or in other words, it is basically implementing an operating system/firmware yourself ad hoc, together with your actual program.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact