[atq2119]

I also always had a fascination for low level stuff and assembly, and I ended up moving into compiler and language development, which made me happy because there's still a lot of math-y stuff going on: the algorithms in compiler transforms, formal specifications of languages, and so on.

I can't really give you advice on how to make the transition. The way it happened for me is that I participated heavily in open-source projects at the end of high school / during undergrad and made some personal connections that way which ended up leading to a remote job long before covid...

[ginnungagap]

Thanks for your comment! Compiler development does sound like a very interesting area, do you have a textbook or online lectures to recommend to get started?

[atq2119]

Unfortunately, no. The textbooks that I have looked into have not been convincing, since they tend to be overly focused on the parsing and syntax aspects, which is IMHO not where the really interesting stuff happens. (It might help if you've never had any CS exposure at all, but I did get exposed to a bunch of parsing theory in my CS minor during undergrad, mostly from a complexity perspective, so...) So I ended up picking things up on-the-fly over time, occasionally going over some presentations / lecture notes or (less commonly) papers that I found references to or found via searching.