I want to iterate, though, for people without CS degrees that doing something like this will NOT make it easier for you to get a software engineer position in and of itself. The skills you learn from things like this will though - so use this to be able to learn what you need to know to build cool side proects. In my experience, companies will usually ignore your lack of CS degree if you have projects that demonstrate your knowledge. I personally have many projects using some high level languages doing things like web apps or visualizations, and I'm also working on an emulator just to teach myself more about computer architecture. It helps that even though my job has me working very far from the hardware, I still find all this stuff fascinating.