For me, one route I went was simply to go up and down the stack. So: machine code --> x86-64 --> C --> virtual machines --> JVM --> Java I've never gone into

For me, one route I went was simply to go up and down the stack. So: machine code --> x86-64 --> C --> virtual machines --> JVM --> Java I've never gone into the JVM itself, but I followed a course computer systems which gave me an idea how a VM works. Another one: machine code --> x86-64 --> C --> browser --> JavaScript --> ES6 --> EmberJS (it uses a vm as its rendering engine) I've noticed that companies don't care though. They simply care about whether I have enough JavaScript experience. For me, personally though, it made me a lot calmer when solving bugs since lower level bugs are (usually for me) much more of a pain than bugs in JavaScript. If you want to figure this path out, I'd recommend https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/