[joshspankit]

Suggestion: Program some (slow) microcontrollers as a hobby.

Go multi-core because async is an important optimization skillset, but other than that just build some things.

I live and breathe optimizations (it feels almost as satisfying to me as driving fast) and as an example recently I created an 11-board (one for each channel) wifi-presence-detection system in a busy wifi area and there was literally no way it was going to work without optimization. From communication protocol to having to be strict about every byte of memory, it’s working with the first principles that built the entire industry.