Hey,
I missed the SOC application for this year, but I might do most of the pre-reqs anyways and hope to work with you guys next summer perhaps.
I've already done a bit of professional software engineering work and academic work and am pretty opinionated about software, but generally prefer to avoid going down the rabbit hole of flame wars if at all possible. For example, I mostly agree with torvalds about C++, but I don't know that it's possible to do a GUI application that is going to work anywhere without at least looking in the direction of Bjarne Stroustroup and forcing a smile. My background is mostly in high throughput web applications, and I worked on an SVG toy application many moons ago when SVG was still a proposed feature in Firefox. While I do find distributed web applications amazing, the fact that I can't really use a computer at all these days without using some uncountable number of distributed web applications, both known and unknown to me is not something I find all that thrilling from a usability point of view.
I'v already started in on some of the SOC application stuff(late, I know). I actually can't do a lot of the stuff due to the extreme difficulty of getting an open source engineering workstation that can stand up to my present circumstances, but hopefully between now and next summer that will either change or I'll have easier circumstances. I guess I'll be lurking on the list either way. Nice to e-meet you.
Cheers,
Alexander