I enjoyed reading this. It could be because I'm thinking of doing more of system/network programming (and learning Zig). I've spent the last 6 years in the JavaScript land and bored of yet-another-bundling or SPA-like pattern.

So there's hope that with consistency and patience, one could build expertise in a totally different area

Thanks, it is inspiring, And it seems like I'm on the same way of that transition, Here is my individual expirment database for learning db internals and rust..

https://github.com/maxnilz/sboxdb

Now, trying to implement a rocksdb-like LSM based storage in modern C++ and call it from the sboxdb, just for refresh my old C++ memory.