There aren't too many simple guides that show you how to use commands to setup your USB or other drive as a normal bootable drive where you can easily boot custom kernels or whatever OS you would like.
1. Get the tools we need:
We install "syslinux" for MBR and "syslinux-efi" for EFI and "MBR" as we need a tool that embeds the actual MBR into our USB:
sudo apt install syslinux syslinux-efi mbr........
One simple flag to configure will create a makefile that statically links all the shared objects and embeds them instead the binary execute. This means as long as you have the same architecture that things should run.
Eg. if you have an old version of Debian with a different version of glibc, then this will solve that problem.
./configure LDFLAGS="-static"
To test that it is really statically linked run ldd:
ldd src/wget........