ESP-IDF is astonishingly well done. As someone who used to install Linux from stacks of Slackware floppies and used open source code back in the days when the install instructions were: configure; pray; make; figure out which of the 11,000 warnings are important; hope it’s simple; give up —— to grab an example, change a couple constants for pins and number of LEDs and have everything just work, _without even any warnings_ was just incredible.

If that piques your interest—-even if, like me, you feel a bit intimidated by hardware—-I tried to write down as much of the journey and learning as I could: https://github.com/zellyn/weblight