Sometimes i think this too. I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like no

Sometimes i think this too. I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing. If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by. Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.