A big part of my interest is because I want to tinker with electronics projects, and I’m curious about embedded work. I love that there’s an ecosystem of chips

A big part of my interest is because I want to tinker with electronics projects, and I’m curious about embedded work. I love that there’s an ecosystem of chips and boards that make this easy, but I realized I’d love to be able to crack open e.g. a broken Commodore 64 and know enough to troubleshoot and repair it. Or use smaller microcontrollers for use cases that don’t really require an entire OS. Beyond this, I think a lot of human thinking is inherently limited by the higher level abstractions we impose on the world, and so while I’d never attempt to write an e-commerce app in assembly, I’ve grown to appreciate the value of understanding the whole system and the wider set of options and deeper intuitions available to me as a result.