[Danieru]

Last year I got to spend the entire summer rewriting 10K+ LOC of C into 2k loc of Perl(with increased performance!) and adding support for sqlite backends.

It was awesome.

What was I working on? Printing under linux.

Perhaps the very definition of not-sexy. Which is just fine by me since that leaves tons of unsolved challenges.

Before I would never have had the courage to contribute to a linux sub-system. Who am I to bug true unix hackers with inane questions like: "How do I build our package?" or "I'm sorry I made a mess of our changelog."!

GSoC solved this barrier. How? Because I knew I would be able to put in the time to learn the domain and be useful. And in turn they knew I would be around long enough to justify the inane questions.

I am very thankful for GSoC, and I think my new co-contributer, and former mentor, is as well.