Hey everyone!

If you’ve read my first blog, you already know how this journey started — with nervous excitement, inspiring mentors, and my deep love for astronomy. Since then, things have only gotten more interesting — and yes, more challenging, but in the best way possible!

Developing, Debugging, and Growing

These past few weeks have felt like a whirlwind of beauty. I’ve found myself diving deeper into spectral analysis, implementing windowing techniques, exploring real research articles, and most excitingly, contributing to the actual development of functions inside Stingray.jl!

A New Adventure: EventList and GTI Handling

Now comes the exciting part — I’ve been working on mission support, PR #49, where I got to play around with EventList structures.

I made a minimal version EventList that could read test files, handle metadata smartly, and even filter events using GTIs (Good Time Intervals). My mentor @fergus and I created a filter_time! function that makes it super easy to slice time windows and work with just the needed data.

It felt awesome to write something like this:


julia
filter_energy!(<(10u"keV"), filter_time!(>(min_time * u"s"), event_list))

Elegant, right?

Also, a quick lesson: GTIs are just two columns — START and STOP — telling us when the telescope was actually collecting good data. Handling them properly means our analysis gets cleaner, smarter, and more accurate. I plan to extend my implementation soon to include full GTI support in EventList directly. Small step, big improvement!

Tests, Tests, and More Tests

One cool thing I picked up from looking at simpler implementations was writing smaller, more flexible test cases. I’ve started structuring my tests to be interactive and IDE-friendly — so I can quickly check and fix stuff without wrapping everything in big test blocks. It makes debugging way less stressful. suggested by @fergus

What's Next?

Right now, I’m:

Tweaking the recipbase functions to make them more modular.
Exploring how to use metadata more flexibly in different missions.
Working on improving event filtering and data handling inside EventList.
Thinking about ways to contribute test utilities that let us simulate dummy FITS files and test logic without needing real data every time.

✨ Final Thoughts

Honestly, it still feels surreal to be working with real tools and contributing code that could one day help researchers uncover deeper insights about the universe. Every commit I make, every tiny improvement I push, and even the bugs I chase down — they’re all helping me grow. Not just as a coder, but as a thinker, a problem solver, and someone who genuinely enjoys the process of learning.

What started as an exciting journey has now become something even more thrilling — it feels like I’m leveling up with each challenge I face (yes, just like in my favorite anime, Solo Leveling 😄). And the best part? This is only the beginning.