I've had success by putting the material between two pieces of wood and drilling through it all. Ideally you clamp it, but you can also just kind of push down on it.
I recently decided to turbo-teach myself basic cuda with a proper project. I really enjoyed Karpathy’s micrograd (https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd), so I extended it with cuda kernels and 2D tensor logic. It’s a bit longer than the original project, but it’s still very readable for anyone wanting to quickly learn about gpu acceleration in practice.