: Focus on setting up your lab and mastering I/O pins, delays, and basic logic. Mid-Level Mastery
Late one night, when the city outside his window folded into a quiet grid of sodium lights, his program sent packets to an address he’d never meant to reach. It was not malicious — he had told himself that many times — but a test: ping, receive, respond. The reply was quick, an unexpected handshake from a device both mundane and intimate: a small home hub owned by a woman two buildings over. She had posted schematics of her own years ago, he realized; she left routers unlocked like open windows.