Interesting! My experience was a little different. I've never taken a formal graphics course, and was struggling with understanding shaders while self-teaching

Interesting! My experience was a little different. I've never taken a formal graphics course, and was struggling with understanding shaders while self-teaching myself graphics programming. For me, I couldn't really understand what vertex/fragment shaders were or why someone would design graphics libraries to use them until going through TinyRenderer. What helped me was being able to see an actual implementation of a vertex/fragment shader (and the renderer that used them) in regular code that I could understand/inspect.