Indeed, the safer thing is to actually build a few toy compilers on the side so you can get a sense for what they are good for, and what level of effort is required to build and maintain it.

Keeping them locked up in the "scary CS" closet only ends up stunting your growth.

I like to write toy compilers or interpreters as an exercise when learning a new language. Usually for a Forth or Lisp or one of Turing Tarpit languages. It requires some of the most common bits of programming: I/O, lexing, parsing (both of source and of arguments to the compiler), file handling, and some common algorithms & data structures (can't have an AST without a tree).