(obviously, i'm not one of the panel members, just chiming in.)
if you're interested in looking at how C can be used in embedded realtime operating systems, i recommend diving into:
https://github.com/ARMmbed/littlefs
(i'm not affiliated.)
it's a lean, logging flash filesystem implementation and i recommend it because the research, rationales, documentation, organization, codebase, test harness, and public API ergonomics all impressed me a lot. it was written for the mbed OS, but it is so well designed that i could integrate it into any realtime OS without too much trouble. and the documentation is thorough enough that after skimming the wikipedia article for filesystems, and maybe an article on how flash chips read and write data, you'll be able to work your way through it. i learned a lot by reading through that repository.