Hello Fellow Developers,

This would be the first time I've run for council, and with this I bring a bit
of fresh blood and fresh ideas. However, I am by no means a new Gentoo
developer.

I've been using Gentoo fairly extensively since around late 2000, and I've
been a developer since 2012. My activities within Gentoo are quite broad. I
lead the Security Auditing project, where I look into the nitty-gritty
internals of security vulnerabilities, and audit code looking for various
problems. I'm regularly responsible for various CVEs, especially in the domain
of the kernel. But my Gentoo activities are not merely security focused. I
maintain quite a few ebuilds, and I've had my fingers on a pretty diverse set
of places in the tree. I'm also peripherally part of the infra team, where I
help maintain our cgit install.

Outside of Gentoo, some of you might know me for various popular open source
projects I maintain, such as cgit [1], pass [2], or WireGuard [3]. Sometimes
you may know me for my zx2c4@kernel.org hat, where I work on the upstream
Linux kernel. Professionally, I run Edge Security [4], a specialized security
consulting, cryptography, and reverse engineering firm.

I'm interested in bringing a bit of a different kind of technical expertise to
the council, providing some new thoughts and ideas from somebody outside the
established Gentoo circles. I've worked on everything from low level compilers
and libcs to high level application frameworks, so I expect to have a fair deal
to contribute to ongoing technical discussions.

Politically, I've generally tried to stay out of the fray of bikeshed mailing
list threads, and instead foster individual relationships with co-developers.
I prefer focused intimate conversations on technical issues rather than sprawling
knife fights. I think a healthy balance is achieved in our distribution when our
technical requirements actually intersect nicely with work people are excited
to do. I'd like to continue to see us bring our tooling and infrastructure up
to date. I believe we remain an extremely relevant and useful distribution,
and I look forward to growing it with each of you.

So, if you'd like some candid technical guidance from somebody a bit outside
the usual circuits but still immensely grounded in Gentoo, I respectfully ask
for your vote.

Best regards,
Jason Donenfeld (zx2c4)


[1] https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about
[2] https://www.passwordstore.org/
[3] https://www.wireguard.io/
[4] https://www.edgesecurity.com/