I'm in a similar situation to the original poster, and I've chosen Rust. Tim McNamara wrote a compelling post making the case for why Rust is a good choice for your 'novelty budget': https://tim.mcnamara.nz/post/621040767010504704/spend-your-n.... Rust has also made me a way better engineer in the time I've been learning it. I've used it for some dabbling in embedded dev, and the cortex-m support (especially for STM boards) is very good. I think the Rust Programming Language (the Rust Book) is a great intro, but I found that making the jump from JavaScript to Rust was daunting in some places. I put together a little intro blog post that approaches learning from that angle: https://tndl.me/blog/2020/introduction-to-rust/