Now is the time to get an early start familiarizing yourself with the ins and outs of EOS if you want to understand how the platform works, follow it's evolution, and be able to contribute to the project. It's fairly straight forward to spin up a local testnet, there is even an automated build script to save you time and help you get up and running in a flash
Checkout the getting started guide on github - https://github.com/EOSIO/eos#gettingstarted