Telling us what type of personal projects you liked doing in the past would be very helpful. Pick something fun to write (to you) that is normally written in a

Telling us what type of personal projects you liked doing in the past would be very helpful. Pick something fun to write (to you) that is normally written in a lower level language. For me C and C++ were fun to learn by writing graphics applications (ray tracers are great for this) and physics simulations (a solar system simulation maybe). Optimizing these to be as fast as possible is a great way to learn about pointers and manual memory management.