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.

GSoC'13 and the exciting world of Open Source

Applications for the Google Summer of Code are now open! I have always been intending to apply for GSoC since I heard of it probably last year. Unfortunately though last year - I just couldn't spare the time to apply to GSoC. I really am regretting this now. The application and pre-application phase of GSoC in itself provide an amazing learning experience.

I have relied heavily on Open Source for all my Computer Science needs.  Emacs, TeX,  Unix, ..., all the tools I am so used to are thanks to legends like Richard Stallman, Knuth,  Dennis Ritchie and the remarkable Open Source vision.  Every time I log into my Linux system, I can't help looking upto OSS for giving me the flexibility and freedom to get my things done with such ease and style. Truly the best things in the world are free. And while I have often thought of making contributions big or small to Open Source, I never really got around to it till GSoC'13 arrived. This time round I had really made up my mind to apply.

...And I am really glad that I did. There are 177 mentoring organizations in participating in this year's GSoC - thus offering lots of diversity to probably satisfy anyone's interests. After scouring the list for long hours, I came across Astropy under the Python Software Foundation. I have always wanted to explore Astronomy while also building up on my programming skills and applying here presented me with the wonderful opportunity to get the best of both worlds this summer! Thus began my application period filled with goodies : I joined mailing lists, idled on the IRC but most importantly I created a git-hub account.  I learnt to fork a repository, work on a patch and open a pull request. It was also immensely satisfying when my patch was finally merged.

I can't thank GSoC enough for introducing me to the exciting world of open source.  I am really itching to make more contributions, I also found a couple of other interesting repos like NLTK. But with exams round the corner I will probably have to wait for a couple of weeks, before I dive deeper into the exciting world of open source. :-)