> I'm not sure what things are left you
> could do differently?
There are so many thing that are left - one cannot do them in a lifetime! Analyze as much bugs as you can, invent your own language that prevents them from happening, write your own compiler for this language, make it fast, with better memory management, not some stop-the-world GC, but with something, that honors low-latency and so on.
EDIT: As RogerL is saying, useful to me intellectual knowledge is what I want to learn. It's pretty much never the same thing as anyone else in the room wants to learn.
So clearly you are not the class of person I have ever dealt with in the past. It would be an incredible breath of fresh air to work with someone who cares enough about their work to write their own compiler for it.
Right now I'm working through SICP, having just finished PLAI, do you have any suggestions for a book on compilers I could do next? I was recently steered away from the dragon book as it's "missing a lot of recent compiler research", but that person had no good alternative.
I think there is definitely three main groups of software people: those that wire together languages and frameworks, those that write languages and frameworks, and those that use a tiny subset of languages to do research. My problem is I think I've been heading down the path of learning that leads more to the second, and you sound like someone who manages to do a job similar to mine, but by being good at that second far more interesting path. I'd be really interested to hear any advice you have. Do you basically have to just work alone?
EDIT: As RogerL is saying, useful to me intellectual knowledge is what I want to learn. It's pretty much never the same thing as anyone else in the room wants to learn.