A construction like this could never work with moonlight, not even theoretically. There is a nice xkcd about it: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/

You could also try microcontroller programming. There you have control over everything and i guess it should be similiar to programming in early days. I started around ten years ago with Arduino and also directly programming them and it still interests me. And with a little hardware you could do some interesting projects. I would even say it could be relevant for career if you want that.