I think you can do simple and powerful web programming without pursuing the latest front-end or back-end frameworks. Just use jQuery and frameworks like symfony

I think you can do simple and powerful web programming without pursuing the latest front-end or back-end frameworks. Just use jQuery and frameworks like symfony or django, or others depending of your favorite language. Those are mature technologies that have been there for years. Mobile might be less complex if you stick with the default native language and tools. I'd say maybe embedded programming is the field where you have the least plumbing, but is more complex on other matters (chip power and consumption). I wouldn't recommend machine learning, computer vision, and certainly not robotics, which is tedious to make it work.