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The Traditional Route (And Its Limits) For years, I dedicated varying amounts of time to learning Japanese: grinding through textbooks, watching grammar videos, and even attending a university course. While these resources certainly built a solid theoretical foundation, my progress always felt quite slow and, in a way, quite unnatural. Learning English as a second language when I was young had been completely effortless; I barely listened in class, skipped my homework, and still regularly aced my tests. Japanese, or at least my approach toward learning it, proved different though. ...

The most important question in computing: “But can it run DOOM?” As a Computer Science student whose background is primarily in software, hardware design always felt like a bit of a dark art. I knew how a CPU worked in theory from various courses, but dealing with gates, clock domains, and routing constraints not just on paper? That was somewhat new territory. My descent into hardware started during a university lab based on the excellent Open Educational Resource HaDes-V. The goal was to guide hardware novices like myself through the process of building a pipelined 32-bit RISC-V processor, eventually bringing it to life on the Basys 3 FPGA Trainer Board. To my surprise, my base implementation worked (well, not on the first try, but testing, debugging and beer eventually solved any remaining issues). It ran C programs, pushed pixels to a VGA display, and handled basic printf() debugging over UART. ...