This is exactly where I’m at with my CS career. I am tired of abstraction. I want to be able to strip it away and work at the lowest levels of the stack. I’ve worked in embedded real-time environments before and found working with the system constraints to be highly rewarding. Yes there are tools that can write and test code for us now, but it’s also true that someone still has to build the low level high performance stuff.

What opportunity do you see in the realm of atoms?

One huge opportunity is in the electrical energy space. With renewables our transmission systems and the control of those many resources is lagging. From control systems point of view having a small number of well controlled sources of energy, aka power stations, it was simpler to manage the load and distribution. Now we have millions of capricious generators of which hundreds are very large, e.g. wind farms and solar farms. Even with grid scale batteries it is like herding stray cats.