| 16 Mar 2026 |
|  Daniel Peirano joined the room. | 22:20:53 |
| Daniel Peirano | Hi - my name is Daniel - I'm currently entering year 2 of a two year sabbatical after working at Alphabet for ~7 years as a Senior Software Engineer TL/M. I joined Google straight after grad school, and haven't had a chance to work with Open Source software before outside of academica. I tripped over NixOS and fell in love with the philosophy and what's possible with it. Thank you so much for opening this opportunity with GSoC for working in depth with NixOS. | 22:23:39 |
| Daniel Peirano | Hi Lisanna - I'm specifically interested in working on the remote building protocol project as I already have been blown away by the power of using nix for remote deployments. Earlier, you discussed that someone had already communicated interest in this project, but I'm hopeful there may still be an opportunity to work on this through GSoC. Please let me know if this is still available based on your more recent posting about this project. Thank you. | 22:26:37 |
| Daniel Peirano | * Hi - my name is Daniel - I'm currently entering year 2 of a two year sabbatical after working at Alphabet for ~7 years as a Senior Software Engineer TL/M. I joined Google straight after grad school, and haven't had a chance to work with Open Source software before outside of academia. I tripped over NixOS and fell in love with the philosophy and what's possible with it. Thank you so much for opening this opportunity with GSoC for working in depth with NixOS. | 22:28:48 |
| 17 Mar 2026 |
 sanjeevlive | Redacted or Malformed Event | 00:34:23 |
| Daniel Peirano | Well... message deleted, but not after your candy. I just thought it was re-posted as the initial interested party stepped back - if you've already started exploring with https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/10451#issuecomment-4016992702 and are still interested, absolutely no worries - and my guess is that Google would prefer to give the opportunity to someone still in uni or just getting started rather than "wait... didn't you used to work here?" 😂 | 00:38:26 |
| Daniel Peirano | * sanjeevlive: Well... message deleted, but not after your candy. I just thought it was re-posted as the initial interested party stepped back - if you've already started exploring with https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/10451#issuecomment-4016992702 and are still interested, absolutely no worries - and my guess is that Google would prefer to give the opportunity to someone still in uni or just getting started rather than "wait... didn't you used to work here?" 😂 | 00:38:58 |
 Lisanna | @arkhamknight25:matrix.org has been working on it already, and has a great start on the proposal, but there may be room for collaboration on this, especially if we divide the work on adding a daemon frontend to nix-scheduler-hook for demonstration purposes and the work refactoring libnix-store, but I'll let you both figure out how to divide the work. Let me just make sure that one proposal can have multiple participants first | 01:51:44 |
| Lisanna | So unfortunately GSoC only allows one participant per proposal | 02:02:23 |
| Lisanna | And just dividing the proposal between NSH work and libnix-store into two proposals wouldn't work because NSH isn't a NixOS project, it's my own project that just happens to be useful for helping prove the rest of the work, and even then I need to double check to make sure involving work on personal projects is even okay | 02:05:07 |
| Daniel Peirano | Alright. Thanks. A little mad at myself as I had put down Mar 16th in my calendar for when we could start applying for projects, but didn't realize they'd be listed or already fully committed to before this date. Thanks. | 02:10:42 |
| Daniel Peirano | And to be clear, there's really no point to an additional proposal being written? The gsoc documents say you can apply to up to three projects and it sounds like there may be multiple applications for each project, but the nixos approach is just one applicant will be supported during the process for each project? It sucks that it would be stomping on someone else's toes, but just trying to get an understanding of how the actual flow for nixos works with gsoc. | 02:19:49 |
| Daniel Peirano | I think I kind of fell in love with this project idea this afternoon, and having a hard time letting go of it. | 02:20:37 |
 Charlie Zhang | I think you could submit proposal, and they will decide who to work with this project. | 02:21:34 |
| Charlie Zhang set a profile picture. | 02:22:25 |
| Charlie Zhang changed their display name from Xiang Zhang to Charlie Zhang. | 02:25:44 |
| Lisanna | Oh man I was not expecting to have anyone interested in this idea, let alone two .-. | 02:35:47 |
| Lisanna | I'm double checking with the admins to see if there's any way to enable collaboration, or if it would really come down to a one or the other situation | 02:58:04 |
| Daniel Peirano | It just feels like the applicant has already been chosen by the mentor - and I understand that everyone has limited bandwidth so how much effort should we realistically expect for setting up proposals. I could try to set one up blind without the support of the mentor, but that doesn't seem likely to get accepted, and if it was, it doesn't make for a smooth start to a project, so uncertain the value of time invested for a proposal in this situation. Just seems like a generally rough situation where the application process isn't as important as being first.
Lisanna is trying to find an opportunity that fits my goals on a side channel which I really appreciate, so that seems like a better path to everyone happy in this situation. Thanks a lot for your suggestion. | 03:39:38 |
| Daniel Peirano | * It just feels like the applicant has already been chosen by the mentor - and I understand that everyone has limited bandwidth so how much effort should we realistically expect for setting up proposals from the mentors. I could try to set one up blind without the support of the mentor, but that doesn't seem likely to get accepted, and if it was, it doesn't make for a smooth start to a project, so uncertain the value of time invested for a proposal in this situation. Just seems like a generally rough situation where the application process isn't as important as being first.
Lisanna is trying to find an opportunity that fits my goals on a side channel which I really appreciate, so that seems like a better path to everyone happy in this situation. Thanks a lot for your suggestion. | 03:43:49 |
| Daniel Peirano | Just as a general query, is there any list of which projects don't still have applicants selected? Is it possible to update https://github.com/NixOS/GSoC/blob/main/ideas/2026.md to reflect which projects are still available? | 03:45:47 |
 Yyovil | I called first dibs on SBOMs though | 05:39:04 |
| Yyovil | guys how cool is embedding yt videos of your project in the proposal? I think it would be super easy to skim through the proposal and mentors could read only if the video got them intrigued. | 06:00:09 |
 infinisil | Proposals can be anything, they're not limited to the idea list. And mentors can mentor multiple projects. So if you think there's opportunity to mentor both together and split up the work with two joint proposals, I think that can work | 06:03:17 |
 Swaraj | infinisil: Hi infinisil! I wanted to give you a quick update. I reached out to getchoo and dish as you suggested but haven't heard back yet.
In the meantime I've been doing more research on the "Improved release notes for Nixpkgs" idea and have a clear approach in mind.
Would you be open to sharing your thoughts on the approach? I want to make sure I'm aligned with what the community expects | 11:59:38 |
| Lisanna | I'll talk to my amrit about whether he can see any way to split the proposal. Maybe the opcodes can be divided. | 13:53:23 |
 beeb5k | Hi, probably a late introduction. I'm Vivek Tiwari and I'm interested in contributing to the modular services project. I've been reading through the documentation and the related PRs/issues to understand how it works. I was wondering what would be a good next step. Should I try porting an existing service (if I'm allowed to)? | 15:24:19 |
 Robert Hensing (roberth) | I don't think we have capacity to track that, and everyone deserves a fair chance. The GSoC process is that participants send their applications to GSoC and then a selection will be made by the mentors. This isn't particularly fun or efficient, but there really isn't much we can do to change that. | 15:54:30 |
| Robert Hensing (roberth) | Not really how it works. Everyone gets a fair chance in the selection process | 15:56:37 |
| Robert Hensing (roberth) | If mentor availability for discussion is not spread evenly that's unfortunate and arguably unfair, but that is a hard problem to compensate for, especially because we have imperfect information too. I want to agree with the GSoC docs that talking early is beneficial | 15:59:46 |
