Thursday 30 May 2013

Astropy : Getting started

The community bonding period of GSoC lasts till 17th June. This is a great opportunity to get familiar with your organization and the repo to which you will be contributing. So far I have set up my work environment. The Python programming I did so far was never a part of an entire software project , so I have been configuring my environment to make this process efficient.

The two sources that have been a huge help to me starting from the application period are:

http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/development/codeguide.html

http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/development/workflow/development_workflow.html

They provide very clear step by step guidelines of contributing to Astropy.

Also I have configured my emacs as per the directions given  in http://docs.astropy.org/en/latest/development/codeguide_emacs.html
This makes it very easy to maintain the required indents, pep8 guidelines, etc when developing with emacs. It is very much a must-do. Astropy has also generously provided me with the license to a full-fledged commercial Python IDE - PyCharm. So I am also trying my hand at that.

Another very useful suggestion I got from Astropy  is to become acquainted with virtualenv. So I have also created a virtualenv for Astropy/Astroquery on my system.

Besides this I have been reading up on a few topics :

Firstly I have been looking up the PEP 8 style guide for Python.

Also since we will be documenting everything with Sphinx, I found a nice tutorial that gave me a good introduction to this.

I had already forked the repos for astroquery and astropy. So now I am  getting familiar with the codebase.

Apart from this there is a growing list of Tasks (thanks org-mode!) that I intend to finish in the community bonding period.

Looking forward to an exciting summer!

The GSoC'13 results are out and my proposal to Astropy under the Python Software foundation is accepted! Through this summer I will be working on astroquery so that its first stable version can be released. Astroquery is an affiliated package of Astropy aimed to make it easy for Astronomers to access online data sources like ViZier, SIMBAD, IRSA and others, from Python programs.

I will be updating this blog weekly as we progress through this summer. Your suggestions for this project are welcome to the astropy-dev mailing list.