I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time.

The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.

From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)