I did Gentoo from stage 1 too back in the day, it’s was a valuable learning experience for me, and those skills helped me to fix things when they went wrong down the track.

Prominent open source projects you’re involved with or have contributed to.

Yep, not bricked. Just frozen.

There are two forms of bricked:

1. hard bricked. This is when a software change (eg, installing a custom firmware) caused the system to fail to boot, and there is no possible way to ever get it to run again.
2. soft bricked. Where a software change caused the failure to boot but there is a way (eg, reflashing using UART) to recover back to an older version that does boot.

Both are terms from the Phone modding community (ie, a phone has become as useful as a brick after this update) it’s quite hard to actually brick a modern PC.