My name is Alfred. I am 20 years old, from Sweden. I have been using Gentoo for around two years, it was my second GNU/*/Linux distribution after briefly testing Arch Linux.
I got interested in computers at a very early age, and later got into programming by making game cheats, which years later on eventually led me into using GNU/Linux. Ever since I was a toddler I’ve been interested in mathematics, and that really helped me to get excited over my early programming projects. I thought it was really amazing how I could utilize simple inverse trigonometric functions together with looping over entity lists to create at the time advanced (for a 13 year old :p) things like aimbots. This was a real snowball effect because I just wanted to learn more and more mathematics, like linear algebra, to understand more advanced topics such as world to view matrices. This then led me into going mathematical specialization at high school.
Starting high school I pretty much stopped programming due to lack of time, but during later years I got into game cheating once again. This time I did more advanced things, like using hypervisors for AC bypassing and spoofing system identifiers. It was then I learned about using GNU/Linux, a system I previously thought was just some experimental OS without any real use case except for making computers less usable. But I got interested because it allowed me to run virtual machines with the GPU passed through, giving me near full performance in games and allowed me to trivially spoof various system identifiers. I then actually gave GNU/Linux a try (without a Windows VM) and installed i3-gaps. It was A LOT better than I had thought and I got stuck with it.
I really liked the system, and I took the opportunity of joining GSoC to learn even more! Woho!