After stumbling on Ben Eaters “Hello world from scratch” [1] I went out and bought the cpu some parts and breadboards. The chip is only a few dollars. It is highly recommended if you want to dive down into computers and digital logic on first principles. Also great fun to get a break from all the screens and layers upon layers of software that I have to deal with daily.
Kind of plugging my own project here, but I too am a software developer that found great joy from breaking away from all the layers of abstraction and working directly with the hardware. I created a portable game system with the 6502:
1. https://youtu.be/LnzuMJLZRdU