Hi! I’m Alejandro Picazo, a Telecommunications and Business student. This year, I learned about the GSoC program and decided to apply.
In this blog, I’ll share my GSoC experience, from choosing a project to (hopefully 🤞) getting accepted, the challenges I face, and everything I learn along the way.
I'm starting this blog a bit late, since I started looking for projects and working on my proposal about a month ago, but I'll try to summarize what I've been doing.
I first learned about GSoC because the program directors visite my university to explain how it works. So, when the list of organizations were published, I started looking for projects that interested me. I liked a few, but the one which I liked the most on about a database for X-Ray observations by the Open Astronomy organization, I've always been into space.
Once I found the project, I started searching what I needed to do to be selected. I introduced my self in a Slack group and read we had to submit a pull request as a requirement to be considered for selection.
At the time, I was in the middle of my exams, so I didn’t have much free time to work on this. I didn't know anything about contributing to an open source project, so I had to search everything. I did know a bit of how github works because I used it to organize my projects for university and of course about programming. Hopefully now we have tools like chatgpt and learning something new is easier.
I searched for issues in the repositories and found one labeled "good first issue", which was about checking some Jupyter notebooks. I started by cloning the repositories of stingray using git bash, but a friend told me that Github Desktop was more intuitive, so I switched to that. After a few problems, I could execute the code in the notebooks. I didn't know it but the notebooks were like a tutorial for using some tools from stingray. While testing, I noticed that a reset button in an interactive graphic wasn't working and I was able to fix it.
After that, trying to make the pull request was more difficult than solving that little problem, because I didn't really know what was a fork, how to push my changes, or how to properly describe the solution, but eventually, I figured it out. Actually I made two pull request, but the other one was because when running an interactive graphic, it appeared a warning that said something was dividing by zero. I went to the line an solve it, but when I made the pull request they told me that there was something already solving that. I don't know what happened I though that maybe I updated the code before submitting my pull request, and in the meantime, someone else had already solved it. I tried checking if the code had been modified recently, but I couldn't find any changes.
Now, I have written my proposal and that’s pretty much how my journey began. In my next post, I’ll continue sharing what I’ve been researching about the NICER telescope and databases. Stay tuned! 🚀