GSOC 2024

 After tinkering primarily with stingray. I also dabbled my hands in sunpy and tardis but I felt that it was a bit out of my dev experience level. I was having trouble getting to know the issues.  But I was enjoying working in open-source. So I thought whatever happens I want to keep on working on these 3 repos no matter what. I will give whatever little spare time I have.  I primarily gave my focus to Stingray. One, it was a bit easy to understand, and two, the mentor was super helpful and active. I asked a lot of questions. I was getting the hang of what this project is about.  I had to make a simple GUI for some basic functionality for stingray. I had quite a bit of web experience so I thought why not.  Now, stingray already had one GUI made by a previous GSOC contributor called DAVE. It was pretty powerful but being JS based soon became too troublesome to maintain.  So there are two choices in front of me:  1) Resurrect DAVE 2) Make a new dashboard with simple functionality that is

 So it's the time to start getting my hands dirty. I started setting up the dev environment for all the three projects.  First was stingray and I faced some issues. But my mentor at Slack luckily had the same laptop and he knew the quick fixes. Also kudos to stingray and specially @matteobachetti. He was really active in the channel and super helpful. I am always asking him dumb doubts and he always responds politely.  I was starting to get a hang of things in stingray. As recommended by the people at stingray and a general rule of thumb: It's a good idea to tackle the issues in documentation first and then move on to issues in the main software packages. This way it would not seem as hard as people think.  And most importantly ask questions from the mentor. It's super important. It's not expected for you to know everything.  In the third week I was finding issues in the Jupyter notebooks meant for tutorials and got to know how stingray creates those lightcurves and how

 After much searching and tinkering I found out some projects that I really liked but was doable too. Two of the projects were in Open Astronomy:  1) A quicklook dashboard for stingray 2) Solar eclipse data analysis with Sunpy and the third was in Tardis,  3) Velocity Packet Tracker Visualization There were a few more, one of them that I liked was in CERN and CERN for me was such a prestigious chance to work in. That I wanted to work in CERN no matter what the project. But I soon realised that I should do what really fascinated me not what I found prestigious. So I stick with these three for now.

 Well hello there, in the first week I was just searching everywhere. Maybe there is some project that I will be able to understand and do. Maybe there is something where my chances of approval are high.  Oh, I didn't introduce myself! I am 3rd year Physics major from IISER Bhopal. My primary interest is Astronomy and its derivatives. It's been a childhood passion to do something in this field. So where I was, yeah, I was searching everywhere for the pserfect project. Something that was an amalgam of astronomy and programming that I was familiar with and was doable.  And I started looking projects in Open Astronomy, Tardis, CERN, etc. I contacted my professors if GSOC was a good idea to go for. They all agreed that a good programming experience never hurts.

 Hi everyone, it's my very first blog and very first GSOC too. I heard about GSOC an year ago but didn't feel confident that I have the necessary skills to go for it so did not apply. The Imposter Syndrome never leaves us, does it? But this time around I am much more confident that I want to contribute to open source no matter what. I am writing this blog a little late so I will push the first few ones to catch up to what I have done in the one month I have started contributing to Open Source.