I just picked up a dev board and started making it flash LEDs, put patterns on the seven-segment display, then had a play with soft CPUs. This gave me ideas on

I just picked up a dev board and started making it flash LEDs, put patterns on the seven-segment display, then had a play with soft CPUs. This gave me ideas on how to use the technology in my job - embedded networking. If you are coming from a software background then maybe look at getting a board with one of the ARM+FPGA hybrid chips, you can run a proper OS on the ARM CPU and I would guess that the bus interface to the FPGA part will be simpler than using Intel's UPI.