Dear MariaDB Developers, I am Charles Muurmu and I wish to participate in GSoC 2016 (and 17 if possible) with MariaDB. First, congratulations for passing a successful application with Google. I have gone through the program time line and students applications start in two weeks, However I am interested in two projects for which I will submit 2 proposals. First, I am interested in the Cassandra storage engine V2 as I have basic knowledge on how to write storage engine plugins as well as working knowledge of cassandra. Also I will be having as backup project the GIS enhancement task which requires adding a new geometry type containing the third coordinate, writing importers and exporters for the extended geometry formats... I have two books guiding me for now: Understanding MySQL Internals by O'reilly media and MySQL plugin Development by Sergei Golubchik. While preparing for student application I will be reading mariadb Knowledge base and ask questions on #maria. I will also try to look an the DataStax C++ Driver which will be used. Thanks, Charles.