In this talk I'll present the pain and joy of working on a BootROM we use for booting our RISC-V SoC prototypes in the lab, with networking capabilities. First I'll give an overview on how writing bare metal code looks like, the challenges one has to deal with, and how we solved it in a prototype-independent way. Then I'll present netboot as an example use case, give an idea of the constraints we had to deal with and where they came from, why such a thing is a requirement when working with SoC prototypes (or even in production), how I did it, and finally do a live demo if time permits.