[froggit]

The term "hardware description language" still gives me nightmares 5 years after my only experience working with them. Was working on my master's in an interdisciplinary CS/MIS/CompEng program for Cybersecurity and needed an elective. "Fundamentals of Computer Architecture" sounded kinda cool.

I walk in on the first day not realizing that while I had done my undergrad in MIS (fun fact: this is a business degree), literally every person in the course was either on the last semester of their undergrad in CompEng or were grad students that already had a BS in CompEng (this school combined some undergrad/grad lectures).

Suddenly i hear the teacher say like "grad students will also need to use an HDL and design a processor compatible with the basic MIPS instruction set." I started at "what's HDL mean?" Teacher responds "If that's a real question then it means: Hurry and Drop this Lecture." Day 1 and I already have the wrong questions for the wrong reasons.

That was a really bad 3.5 months... But it's also proof that if you hate literally everything hard enough, then it is absolutely possible to pull a 100 day "zero to MIPS HDL prototyping" speedrun.