There is no need to spend time on the hardware either, but OP wanted to learn something.
For those who might be interested here is my firmware project: https://github.com/marcv81/umk. I like to think it's more approachable than QMK, at the cost of features.
For those who might be interested here is my firmware project: https://github.com/marcv81/umk. I like to think it's more approachable than QMK, at the cost of features.