I recently bought myself an STM32 Nucleo microcontroller board to play around with. What fascinated me was how much more flexible things are at this level, how much more you can do yourself. With an ESP32 that's not really the case, you're always tied to ESP-IDF or some other framework. I started with a first simple example, the kind everyone knows and has done before: the famous Hello World . It's simple, and that's exactly why it's useful. You don't learn a language's syntax with it, it's too small for that. You learn how to actually use the language. What file format, how to compile, how to link, how to run the result. That's why I always reach for Hello World first whenever I pick up a new language or a new environment. It forces me to run the whole build system once before I do anything else. Two things I learned this way that weren't obvious to me at the start. First: you can learn a surprising amount from a simple example if you take it seriously. Second: simple is almost never really simple.…