I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and comp

I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and computers, old and new. Other than that, after finishing university, I applied for a job, went to the interview, got the job and so on. Nothing special. One thing that probably did help me was that, while still being a competent enough programmer (working part-time included), I got my BSc in Electrical Engineering, so it was especially easy to get into the embedded world (being able to go from reading a schematic to writing the driver, while being able to debug stuff with the logic analyzer and the oscilloscope are good assets). But that's not a rule, I was the only one in my team with a degree in something other than CS/CompEng, and I'm still in a minority everywhere I go. Edit: oh, yeah. The other thing is, I started at a small company. A lot of companies nowadays tend to overspecialize even their fresh-out-of-school junior programmers. It doesn't happen everywhere, but where it does, it's a disaster. I worked on a lot of stuff in my first year, from various peripheral drivers to factory test routines.