GSoC 2022: Project Helioviewer — Starting my summer with SunPy

Hey folks, this is my first blog about my work at Google Summer of Code 2022 (actually my first blog in general…)

I will try to sum up how I got selected for the program (GSoC) and what I did in the first two weeks.

I started contributing to open-source projects in September 2021, when I heard about the Google Summer of Code program from my friends, I had an eye for GSoC 2022.

Through the timeline, I knew that on the 7th of March Google will release the list of accepted organizations participating as mentors in 2022, I continued building my developer skills.

On March 7th, I searched for organizations that matched my interest, i.e, science.

When I saw openAstronomy at that moment I was like: what the heck? astronomy and open source together? huehuehue

I focused only on one project and while I prepared the proposal, I also made the following contributions:

In PR #5980 (code) and #6024 (updating docs), I wrote a test case for sunpy.timeseries.
PR #5961 adds an example to show “how to reproject a map to a map projection with a custom origin”.

In the one month before the results, to learn more about software testing and get familiar with pytest, I searched for issues labeled “Tests” in sunpy and submitted this pull request.

On 22nd March, I received an email from Google which says:

Welcome to Google Summer of Code 2022!

It was the most significant moment for me, for my family & friends as well! This marked the start of the Community Bonding Period. More details about my project.

The Community Bonding Period

After getting selected for the program, I continued my contribution to sunpy. I worked on a python script that updates vendor code automatically in this pull request. I meet my mentor Nabil Freij, Jack Ireland and Daniel Garcia Briseno. In a meeting, I was introduced to my mentors and discussed a plan.

The First and the Second Week

The coding period started, and I worked on designing the generic function for the API wrapper. This PR is ready to merge and thanks to my amazing mentors, I have a clear idea of what I will do in the next two weeks. This is just the beginning, I will continue to post my GSoC work experience here.

THIS IS EXHILARATING!