I think there are interesting things happening in the compiler space, so I hope to learn more about those.
Coincidentally, I find Rust my favorite "tech" in 2018 because of the compiler and its various targets (like Nvidia cards).
Reddit has /r/sdr which has some good resources; me I used antirez's plane-tracker, then wrote some code to listen for buttons being pressed from remote-control buttons.
These buttons are pretty cheap and reliable, and the batteries have lasted for a year or so now. You hit the button in the bedroom and the PC in my office plays "siren.mp3" over the speakers, for example.
Even now I've had my wife/child summon me via presses.
srsLTE and tinyLTE whitepapers are worth looking into as well. The whitepapers describe the infrastructure and hardware to purchase. All in all, these are surprisingly simple to get working together. After that, it is up to you what to hack on. MEC paradigm is something specifically relevant to software engineers.
I find that these kinds of efforts allow an increase in programmer productivity. MIR is reasoned in the previous link, and LLVM is interesting because it then allows the "enhanced" code to be shared among many other platforms with seemingly zero-cost to the programmer.
That is, if you can jabber about programming language theory and write compiler code, I think you can have an impact on the industry which exceeds that of a machine learning engineer (which at least my peers usually think that are driving the future).
Then again, I currently do not know how the sausage is made. I might be wrong.