Hashnode seems to represent the market as a whole so far, by a wide representation of front end web developers, fewer backend developers, and even fewer system programmers. Representing the smaller group of sysadmin/operations oriented coders as well as the hobbyist low level tinkerers, I'd like to hear what interesting things you do that is closer to the hardware and infrastructure. I'm sure there are tons of creative yet not yet mainstream solutions and projects being developed that we could all gain from learning about.
Currently I am writing a COAP to HTTP proxy in Rust for a IoT project. This is basically my low-level / transport projects the others are more high-level and abstract. Except some cryptography stuff but even there I use maintained official libs and their APIs.
But usually I do most frontend to backend to system architecture. Actually the other way around. The real low-level stuff I am currently dipping my toe in and see how it goes.
When I'm not working on code to support my employers' Kubernetes centered environment, specifically automation code to ensure a number of clusters all serve the same base set of applications for customer onprem-installs, I enjoy exploring and coding for retro architectures, such as the Incompatible Time Sharing system for the PDP-10, the Nintendo Game Boy, Amiga 500, etc. I once built an emulator for a non-existing 8-bit computer of my own design, which I then programmed (with my own assembler) classic games like Sokoban for. I often play with electronics and microcontrollers (plain AVR, not Arduino because I'm of hipster reasons) where I've implemented a light weight TCP like protocol for RC car radio communication. My next project is probably going to be a Z80 based computer (built using original ICs, replacing EEPROM and PIO with a modern AVR microcontroller) that I wish to bootstrap into at least a Forth system somehow. For the complete retro feel, it will feature an Altair 8800-like front panel with switches and step programming.
I previously built a network automation engine and a vendor/device agnostic network device API, basically something like NAPALM, before I knew that project existed.
Mark
I'm not sure systems programming is an exactly defined term. But maybe some of my projects qualify...
In my spare time, I'm working on a compiler (targeting wasm), which I am implementing in Rust. The (attempt at) generation of performant code taught me a lot about low-level stuff, as did the compiler itself.
I also started on a database, but it never got far, too many projects...
One that is technically an application but feels like systems programming: I'm doing a competition with some colleagues who can implement the fastest Voronoi image transform. Every allocation, instruction and indirection must be considered.
I only got into the low level stuff about 12-6 months ago, although I did some performance-critical stuff before that with numerical simulations.
My main language was Python for years, I never thought systems stuff was this interesting.