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As a software engineer, I was alway curious about how computers really work on electronics level and how code gets compiled and assembled and finally executed by the machine. I followed the free courses from Ben Eater about building a 8-bit computer from scratch https://eater.net/8bit and building a computer using the 6502 cpu https://eater.net/6502. Following these 2 courses made 4 topics click.

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You might also find it interesting to implement a CPU on an fpga, a double win if you’ve never programmed an fpga before. For me it helped soldify exactly how a basic cpu works. In uni we had to do this for MIPS architecture with 5 state pipeline. The project was similar to [1] we also used the same book “ Computer Organization and Design”. You end up making your own assembly language in the process too.

[1] https://github.com/valar1234/MIPS

Ditto here, 25 year career in software before I got curious about hardware-level computing and Ben Eater’s stuff was just so well done and enlightening.

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