what-happens-when VS tiny-bootstrap

Agreed!

It reminds me of:

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

and how many of today’s CS-degree holders would barely understand any of it. As someone who has also “grown up with all the technology”, I’ve learned and experienced all that. But as a percentage of “software engineers”, there’s fewer and fewer that do every day.

There is a pretty comprehensive answer to number 2 here

Ask them to describe what happens when you visit a website and grill them on every layer of abstraction, every implementation detail.

This is a classic interview question and it basically means "How does internet work?" It is great because it allows to check how many levels of understanding it a developer has. The answer may be quite lengthy, for example: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Perhaps you will find https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when useful.

I wrote an article on writing a tiny pseudo-bootloader a while back[0] that got a bit of traction on HN at the time; you may enjoy it as an accesible and fun stepping stoke into the space. There’s an accompanying GH repo[1] with all the resources you need to run it yourself :)

[0]: https://www.joe-bergeron.com/posts/Writing%20a%20Tiny%20x86%...

[1]: https://github.com/Jophish/tiny-bootstrap