Week-1: Mending the roads for smooth travel in subsequent weeks

Hello folks,

So the 1st week ended pretty quick and here I am to share my 7-day journey. The most shockingly amazing thing happened this week was that my mentors made me the member of our Org - StarKit. Now I'm not only a contributor but officially a collaborator! I am thankful to my mentors for believing in me. 😊

 

What did I do this week?

- I began with fixing issue in some of the filters we're using (problem in loading them) by writing code to clean the filter data. After several discussions with mentors, I finally ended up creating a new updated HDF file of filters - that works perfectly fine!

- Our Travis test builds unexpectedly began to fail - I identified it was due to a recent update in pluggy (used by pytest). So I created an issue on pluggy repository, their developers were amazingly fast as they fixed the problem within 6 hours.

- Updated codebase for the setup of doctr (to deploy our docs on GitHub pages directly from travis build).

 

What is coming up next?

This week, work was mostly inclined on fixing & setting things up. In following week, I'll most probably work on creating a static interface on our Sphinx docs that will let users to access required filter curves & information. Or if my mentors suggest to undertake something more prior, I'll work on that (since our package WSynPhot is in its initial phase - so I can't strictly go according to my proposed timeline).

 

Did I get stuck anywhere?

While setting up doctr - I got confused and mistakenly took the OAUTH key sent by my mentor as public key to put in Travis. Due to my PR, it got publicized! My mentor forwarded me the mail he got from GitHub about privacy leak and I realized what a blunder I committed! *facepalm*

But he was cool about it, said that it was a learning experience for me. So I created another PR for doctr setup, once he himself added newly generated public keys. We had some discussions about the uncertainities he had about my PR but I convinced him and it worked as expected. And viola! we got our docs deployed on github pages. Later my mentor realized OAUTH key was actually not required in the process and cleared the confusion for all of us. 😅

 

What was something new and exciting I learned?

- Taking initiative to communicate: I reported issue 1st time to another org whose tool/service we're using (pluggy, and SVO from which we obtained unclean filter data) - my mentors even admired me for this!

- HDF5 files (a way to store & organize large amount of data hierarchically in groups): Understood about how they organize data while investigating erroneous data in them and reading/writing them using pandas and h5.py

- And the biggest thing - Keeping Patience: Sounds pretty obvious to already have. But no! when you work in a team, you become very eager to hear from other members, so that you can proceed and quickly finish your work. As my mentors are astronomers by profession - they remain quite busy in their work & conferences. So I've learned that it is OK to wait (get involved in something other than this project) before you hear back from them, even if it takes a day. But that is for sure that they do follow up when they become free. So keep patience & stay calm!

 

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Thank you for reading. I'll get back to you next week with my new experience & exciting learnings. Stay tuned!