As someone who followed a course on all of this, this is indeed how we started out.

1. Read Flush + Reload

2. Then reproduce it in C

3. Then read Meltdown

4. Reproduce it in C

5. Read Spectre

6. Reproduce it in C

After that we had to implement a VUSEC paper. I chose GLitch [1].

[1] https://www.vusec.net/projects/glitch/