Hi Rick,
Welcome to OpenDremel team.
Java programming language familiarity per-se is less important here, but the whole opendremel project follows "compiler" pattern. We accept the query and compile it to low-level code and execute directly. This is OpenDremel in a nutshell. So more important is here how excited you are about compilers class.
Beyond the compilers we are implementing a columnar data compression, may be this area would be of interest to you to contribute.
-camuel.