[Haskell-cafe] Greetings and Maybe GSoC-2012

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello everyone,

(long mail ahead)

My name is Sergiu Ivanov, I have been trying to wrap my mind around
Haskell for 2 years already, but success still feels far away :-) This
makes me more and more attached to Haskell though, so I can plainly
say: I love this language :-)

I guess I should have joined the online Haskell community waaaay
earlier; too bad the idea's only struck me now.  Therefore, I'd like
to hereby greet everyone and wish a lot of good luck and good fun with
whatever Haskell-related and non-Haskell-related tasks you may be on!
:-)

I have graduated Computer Science and I'm now pursuing my MSc in what
is officially referred to "Mathematics and Informatics" (sic), but has
turned out to be quite heavily biased towards algebra for me.  The
subject I currently seriously focus on is category theory; I have
graduated a course in module theory and I'm now going through
quasigroups, lattices, and Gröbner bases.  I'm doing some research in
computability theory, namely, in P systems
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system), but also other computing
devices, including some attempts at quantum computer science.

My usual IRC nickname is scolobb, and I plan to be hanging out on
#haskell quite regularly.  I'd be glad to contribute to the community
with whatever knowledge and skill assets I'd be able to provide :-)

(End of Presentation)

I'll turn to the Maybe part of the subject of this letter now.  I've
seen haskell.org has participated as an org in GSoC 2011.  If the
community plans to file an application this year as well and if
haskell.org is accepted again, I'd be happy to submit an application
for some fancy project.  I'd enjoy working on something hard,
requiring a lot of mental effort to understand, something which would
make me feel cleverer when I have finished it :-) I have a fairly
broad experience with programming languages and frameworks, so I don't
mind committing to
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1592 ,
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1547 , or
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1583 .  However,
among my favourites is this one:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1582 .  This one
sounds complicated and mixing a lot of stuff.  My experience with LLVM
is zero, but I'm willing to learn, of course.

You can apprehend my Haskell skills by throwing a look at
https://gitorious.org/remoting and
https://gitorious.org/psim/haskellengine .  The first one is a simple
actor-model based remoting framework; that was a project for one of
the university projects.  The second one is a part of my graduation
project, in which I mixed Java, Jython, CUDA and, of course, Haskell.
I'm not trying to boast, though: I can easily see the yet unwide
horizon of my Haskell knowledge, which I would like to expand as far
as possible.

As far as I remember from my previous experience with GSoC, potential
students are required to solve some simpler tasks to show what they're
capable of.  I understand that it's quite premature to talk about the
summer of code as yet, but I'd be glad to hear of such possible test
(or not-so-test) tasks which I could complete.

Thank you for reading this much,
Sergiu