Hi everyone, I am Charles Muurmu also known as laserlight on IRC and I was selected for GSoC 2016 to work on migrating MariaDB Cassandra storage engine from the Thrift API to Datastax driver. I will be mentored by Spetrunia. My goals for this community bonding period will be get myself ready by accomplishing the following tasks: Fork and clone the server code. Try to build the code. Setup a blog on which I will post weekly reports on progress. Study the Datastax C++ driver API and documentation. Study the ha_cassandra.xx code and storage engines architecture. I believe these will prepare me for my first task when coding begins which will be to integrate the Datastax C++ driver into the MariaDB Server build system. I equally look forward to more instructions from my Mentor on how we will work on this task and lastly, I would love to congratulate the other students selected with MariaDB. Cheers, laserlight.