as I've gotten older I've increasingly wondered if I should make the jump (back, technically) to low-level programming. working on those highly constrained devices, every cycle matters, every bit, every watt, etc. because that's where I started as a kid and think it would give me a market advantage over the younger generation who've grown up with supercomputers in their pockets, a dozen high-level languages to choose from, frameworks for everything, tutorials and videos for everything, and not really having to worry about performance or resource usage like "we" used to have to do just to make anything work at all.