Hi Rhian, thanks for being a fan of my stream! It's great to have you hanging out on Sundays.
I fell into front-end development when I was a teenager, but before that I was running POKE register commands on my Commodore 64. The low level side of computers always appealed to me, so hardware has been a side hobby since I was a child. Front-end development is something I loved doing, really excelled at skill-wise, and didn't require a degree for in order to land a job.
The NodeJS hardware programming happened because I was using Flash Communication Server + proxying my serial ports to a localhost in order to create a web interface for my Arduino boards. This was a lot of work, and did not produce very secure or accessible interfaces. When NodeJS came along, there were some serial libraries written by others that helped me offboard from Flash and into the future of web technology + hardware!
I'd recommend connecting with the Nodebots community and reading the resources there to get started! http://nodebots.io/