Greetings from the lurker's pool

[Derek VerLee]

I have been following TUNES for maybe 10 years or so, on and off.  I haven't 
been on the mailing list for most of that time, though I did post early on. 
The last few days I've been skimming the websites and archives to get up to 
speed, and decided to reintroduce myself.

As for my background, most of my experience is with c/c++.  I have a little 
(but not much) experiance in plenty of other languages, and recently I've 
been working to become more proficient with CL.  I am something of a 
generalist I suppose. I use all of FreeBSD, Linux, and windows as my 
operating systems, and do some fairly light-duty network administration type 
work as well.  A long time ago (as part of a class), wrote an almost-working 
compiler.  I had left the design open for retargetability (if that is a 
word), as well as having multiple input languages as well.  However, I found 
that the way I organized it, the code became far to unwieldy after a while. 
This is what I was actually trying to avoid when I planned the system out, 
and at first it appeared to work brilliantly.  I have always been interested 
in reworking this in another, more flexible or extensible language (like 
Lisp).  I did come across a project to add aspect oriented programming to a 
c++ environment, and it was interesting because the author(s) inspiration 
for it was almost identical to my experience (they wrote a compiler using 
the same ideas I did, and ran into the same problem).  However, I'm weary 
now about using c++ for a project like this...
I also had a project to implement my own "modular synth" audio and midi (and 
eventually video or any data stream) system, much like puredata and max/MSP 
(and there are several others), which never got far off the ground.  Apart 
from these I read a lot, though I am underread compared with many on this 
list, I'm interested with pretty much all software engineering type topics, 
and especially anything high level, abstract, and grandiose.

I am curious what sort of work is being done most actively right now?

I'd also like to hear suggestions of where to contribute if anyone has them.

_derek