Spending a couple of months tinkering with hardware and programming assembly will make you understand the basics of how a computer works in a totally different way than other high level languages will. I haven't programmed a single line of assembly after high school (back in the 80s...), but the fundamental understanding of how operations are executed, how registries work makes it so much easier to understand the whys, the ifs and buts of programming and optimization. And you'll certainly start to appreciate clean, effective code.