From what you've mentioned, I'm focusing on Go and GraphQL professionally (I'm a backend engineer). Flutter will definitely get looked at. Something I'd add if you also spend time in backends is infra - choose a system (probably AWS, GCP, or Azure in that order) and a infrastructure-as-code middleware for them (e.g, Terraform). More and more these days, the provider is now part of the stack.
Moto G4 or G5 (when the 5 comes out). The Moto G pretty much invented the category of inexpensive, solid performing phones with a non-tampered-with Android experience.
Honestly, there are far to many to even list. I think part of the issue may just be that not every application is an 'app' - computing is increasingly intertwined with physical applications. Here are a few consumer-focused 'emerging tech' applications off the top of my head:
Architecture / performance / networking / databases are tools, not applications in and of themselves - find a problem that demands extremely high performing systems, and there will be work done in those areas. Example: the PX 2 system for self-driving racecars that Nvidia announced a few days ago at GTC hits six of your bullets points by itself (architecture, performance, computer vision, networking, parallel systems, computational science).
If you're just looking to manage your personal environment, probably Vagrant + Chef. If we're talking about for a team or organization, a former co-worker of mine wrote a nifty tool called Boxen [http://boxen.github.com] that's definitely worth checking out.
I'm not a miner, so correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Tesla cards (and the servers designed around them) are intended for specific use cases: mission-critical enterprise solutions and scientific HPC. As a result, they run slower processor and memory speeds in comparison to nVidia's own consumer products, use ECC memory, and are optimized for double-precision over single-precision performance. Mining with a Tesla is like gaming with a Quadro card.
I first learned about bit-shifting when I took DIP / Computer Vision as an undergrad. All the assignments were done as plugins for ImageJ, which is apparently widely used in the scientific community (or so the course claimed). ImageJ stores the pixel values for images as bytes, ints, or longs (depending on the color-depth), so to get the individual component values from a 32-bit RGBA image (8 bits per channel), you would do something like this:
int pixel = image.get(x, y);
int alphaVal (pixel & 0xFF000000) >> 24;
int redVal = (pixel & 0x00FF0000) >> 16;
int greenVal = (pixel & 0x0000FF00) >> 8;
int blueVal = (pixel & 0x000000FF);
That's just one example w/ one piece of software, but I know similar approaches are often used within the world of imaging / graphics. Maybe networking? Seem like it would correlate well to IP address operations.
I'm guessing that that's the reporter's fault. The quote seems to referring to AWS, which they've probably never heard of, leading them to make a uninformed guess as to its meaning. Just another case of general media reporters covering stories they're not qualified for.
One thing I love about Lin's story is that it's making people realize that today's "industry experts" still don't perfectly place talent where it needs to be, even in an industry as heavily scouted and recruited as pro sports.
focusing more on design choices and principles rather than on CSS technicalities
I'd suggest using it specifically for this reason - that is, unless there is another framework that does an equally good job of getting out of one's way as Bootstrap. That said, it definitely makes sense to try to limit its use to a small subset for your tutorials.
Xen is still widely used. IIRC Xen provides the virtualization layer for AWS, and it is used by some pretty large hosting providers (Linode comes to mind). It also is packaged into a number of commercial commercial offerings. Oracle's VM solution is really just Xen running on Red Hat with some optimizations for their platform stack, same with Citrix. Clearly those two implementations alone is going to be a decently-sized install base.
I don't know how much KVM is used in the wild, but it has been crowned the "official" hypervisor for RHEL and Ubuntu, so I would guess that it it's been steadily gaining steam w/ the OSS crowd.
The funny thing is that, while my first reaction was "that's really cool", my immediate next thought was that it would have been much cooler using augmented reality instead of figurines and models. I wonder how much longer there is going to be demand for physical proofs of concept like these.
In the article, it said that the device used could extract data regardless of whether the phone was password-protected or not. Looks like it's time to start encrypting our cellphone data as well.
There factor of risk aversion exists, but I'd argue not any more so for women than for men of the same racial groups. This is because the risk really isn't financial - these days everyone knows that there's tons of money to be made in tech. The risk is in prestige - doctors often become known figures in their communities in a way that engineers rarely do. Believe me, this can be a huge factor for people who grew up noticing that they were treated "differently" - minorities, immigrants, women, etc. If you are doing something awesome with your life, you want people to know about it; it can often mean the difference between being shown respect and not.
In response to Shamiq, this could be why most of the "underrepresented minorities" you see in tech are actually women; arguably, they have less to prove.
What kind of engineer are you? You mention having foundations in C and Matlab; is this something that you would be interested in building on or do you want to leave the engineering world completely? I spent a lot of time hanging around the Image Processing / Computer Vision lab during university and pretty much everything they did was in Matlab and C / C++ (ImageMagick and OpenCV).
Elite athletes are valuable only because they are scarce.
That statement is vacuous in regards to the argument he's trying to make. Anyone who is elite at what they do is scarce, regardless of occupation; that's essentially the meaning of being elite. What sets athletes apart is the degree to which society rewards that eliteness.
raniskeet has a good point; if you've read and really understand the content of both of those, there's not too much that you'll learn from just reading more books. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you (read The Good Parts, started the Def Guide), and my next step is not to read about Javascript, but to read Javascript. Pick a codebase of something you use or want to start using and learn how it ticks.