A Summer of Coding and Astronomy — GSoC’21 at OpenAstronomy

“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.”

— Linus Torvalds

Google Summer of Code is probably the most notable and interesting programs a student can be a part of an undergrad can be a part of. From reading GSoC blogs to write my story, it feels unnatural.

This post is more of an introduction to GSoC and my project at OpenAstronomy, I’ll be covering my prep and journey later on.

About my GSoC project!

Generating periodograms for astronomical data is the core task of Stingray. Because periodograms are often noisy, several methods to denoise periodograms exist in the literature, among them the multi-taper periodogram Stingray aims to provide a comprehensive library of reliable, well-tested implementations of common algorithms for time series analysis in Astronomy. DAVE is an elegant GUI to the library, developed during a previous GSoC.
Due to the fast-evolving Python and Javascript landscape, this GUI is not compatible with the current versions of the dependencies. Also, Stingray has now new features that were not implemented in the original GUI.
In this project, I would be refreshing the GUI dependencies, update the package building infrastructure, and add the new functionality introduced in recent versions of Stingray.

I would be making sure DAVE would be up and running again over the summer, couldn’t have been happier!

About me

I’m Rachitt Shah, a second-year undergrad at VIT Pune. I’m also doing Google Season of Docs with the STE||AR group for their project HPX.

I’m a growth associate at gradCapital, a student-centric VC fund that aims to help student startups.

I love product management, tech(of course!) and venture capital.
Here’s my social profiles link -

https://twitter.com/rachittshah

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachitt-shah/

If you have any questions about open-source and dev, don’t hesitate to reach out.
May the source be with you!