[woodman]

You eat an elephant one bite at a time. I've found that the majority the of intimidating complexity in projects I've tackled is directly related to handling legacy hardware and edge cases for things that don't matter anymore, it is surprising how simple things like shells can be.

[Retra]

Half my CS education was implementing various parts of operating systems. These things are pretty straightforward if you've got a few books and aren't trying to throw every imaginable feature into the mix.