I am feeling bored as an engineer building API's, writing backend, front-end. As a software engineer, my job is mostly the same stuff. There are new frameworks and tech stacks but I feel I have been doing the same thing one way or the other since a long time. What are some exciting areas for a software engineer to learn. Something which is not tangential(a new programming language, tech-stack or a framework) but something really niche and exciting to learn? Something ground-up innovation which is happening right now and is exciting to learn?
1. FPGAs. Get your software turned into sorta-hardware. Very fast, and now, very cheap.
2. Reinforcement learning. Teaching a machine to optimally play a game - any game. Very complex rabbit hole, but surprisingly easy to dip your toe in. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24693277