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