I would recommend either to build up some RTOS/OS knowledge or excercise your skills in Low-levelish game programming with maybe C and SDL. I found especially these two very rewarding and I'm also making a living on the former for 15 years.

https://wiki.osdev.org/ is a good source for getting a hold in OS development

Are these SVG graphics with the little boxes and arrows generated? Is this gnuplot?

Proudly made with Inkscape and a mouse.

Reframe it. Detach emotionally from the result by offering the fruit of your past and future struggle to god. It is not a self-induced failure, but something that life has thrown at you. The universe just had other plans. Nature has built us specifically to cope with that.

Tool to craft an expression of bit operations (add, sub, shift, neg) which is equivalent to an integer multiplication by any given int64 constant.

Basically playing compiler here, for a hypothecial ISA which has no <mul> instruction. Made in a day just for fun.

Ask yourself what your motives are. Did you post to fish for compliments? Are you depressed/overworked and want sb to advise you changing your life? You know best. Ask yourself what makes you happy. How do you feel about what you do? If you love it, just keep pursuing and others will also do and spend on it.

That's one of the worst articles on this topic I've ever read.

Could anyone recommend a better one?

No sarcasm intended, this is an important issue.

If we want to approach a topic "How to detect/avoid B/o" in a scientific manner, we should begin with a definition of what that condition is and what it is caused by.

It's been some years since I investigated on that topic, but I remember there are basically two paradigms:

A) Blame the guy/dev/employee B) Blame the company/environment/manager

Depending on your point of view, you may want to settle somewhere in between these two extremes. I find "The truth about burnout" by Maslach/Leiter in my bookshelf, who where the first ones doing a proper scientific analysis. They pretty much end up with paradigm B. As a dev, I liked that.

Thanks I'll have to check that out.

I suppose I'd go with B, though I have no idea what to do about that.

I was thinking this is a very important and worthwhile topic. But the article reads like bullet points dreamed up in one minute and then filled up with sweet cotton.

It's an ad for (bad) managers.

Break it down and let freelancers develop the building blocks which you integrate by yourself into the final solution.