It’s a bit more theoretical, but working my way (slowly, with many re-watches of certain videos) through the Coursera compilers course was a major milestone for me: I highly recommend finding an accessible way to do one of the CS things you think only Wizards can do: once you tackle one or two such projects, and realize that it’s hard, but mostly just slogging your way through it, it can be an enormous confidence boost :-)
I’m always happy to help anyone going down this path: zellyn@(most things) if anyone reading this wants to try but is feeling nervous.
One additional note: the provided code for that course is (or was a decade+ ago!) either C++ or Java, but the tests and test scaffolding are fairly straightforward.
I opted to translate into Go as I went, which meant:
- a lot more work/time
- slower progress
- no “if you fill in this missing piece, we’ve provided the rest so your compiler will work end-to-end”
- an annoying amount of trying to print ASTs exactly like the C++/Java code for validation purposes
But I got to use Go instead of those other languages! ;-)
I’m always happy to help anyone going down this path: zellyn@(most things) if anyone reading this wants to try but is feeling nervous.