Hi,

My name is Ethan and I'm currently a high school senior. Attending uni next
year, so I should be elligible to apply to the GSoC.

Quick background, I first started using Linux in the August of 2016.
Started with a few weeks of Ubuntu, then a few months of Arch Linux. On
Gentoo Linux since March of last year. Loving Gentoo so far.

I'm interested in both the Binhost API support and Social Linux
distribution network ideas posted on the GSoC ideas wiki page. I believe
that compile times is one of the factors that turns potentially interested
users away from Gentoo. These two ideas, specifically better Binhost
support, will hopefully make slow compile less of a factor against choosing
Gentoo as a distro.

I'm interested in hearing more about how you guys expect the Social Linux
network to function. Currently, I have some inspiration from nixOS. I have
not used nix before, but the way nix handles configuration is pretty cool.
It is all done in one central location. Maybe it would be cool to implement
something similar on Gentoo.

Link that might help explain ore:
https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-configuration-syntax

However, I think this might be too limiting / simplistic for the multitude
of choices that Gentoo offers. It would make sharing configs easy. Each
system would be uniquely defined by the config file.

I go by chocopuff on freenode. My GH is zyklotomic (nothing to see there
though). I have played around with ebuilds a bit, enough to know how to
version bump and attempt submitting PRs. My bugzilla account is also tied
to this email address. I have much to learn, am still a newbie!

Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing back.

Best,
Ethan Kiang