I am very, very bored with front-end development.
Truthfully, for the last two years I've been rather dissatisfied with my programming career more generally. I've done a lot of thinking about alternative careers, including some quite radical changes, like going into law or the civil service.
But I still want to give software engineering a chance. I've been enthralled by computers since I was about ten. That's twenty years of passion. I don't want to just throw that away unless I have to.
My background to tech isn't a traditional one. I studied English literature intending to become a critic, but became disillusioned with academia sometime around my third year. I worked as a technical writer, then a UX designer, before finally sidestepping into JavaScript programming.
I am now a senior developer and tech lead at what should be an exciting startup. For the last year I've been mostly doing WebVR development (through THREE.js) and Node backend work. I've convinced my team to adopt TypeScript and written some fairly involved bits of client side code. But it still feels hollow.
I feel I'd like to try something much more technical, much more low-level. My first experience of programming was writing ARMIPS assembler patches for classic PSOne games. My first GUI tool was an app I cobbled together just to write a videogame mod. I feel I'd like to capture the same excitement and hands-on, low-abstraction way of working.
What would be the easiest way to achieve this?
