Maybe you're different than me, but I have a tough time really learning something without a concrete task at hand. I also find that I have a tough time learnin

Maybe you're different than me, but I have a tough time really learning something without a concrete task at hand. I also find that I have a tough time learning if I don't have someone to ask questions of. And I find that online developer communities are much more welcoming of newb questions after you've contributed something concrete. If it was me (and it really was me just a few years ago), I'd git clone llvm, join #llvm on freenode, and ask if there's any simple refactoring or cleanup people are doing. Give me a chance to absorb the code and also build some goodwill in the community, which I might then leverage into getting help on more complex parts of the compiler that I want to hack on. If you're looking for a project, the nvidia GPU ("NVPTX") backend in LLVM has a bunch of horrible global variables protected by locks, and it all really should go away. And it's not hard to find other simpler refactorings to do in there, it's pretty yucky. No compilers experience needed, just C++ skills.