Why this Community Bonding Period(CBP)?

According to Google,

“The community bonding period is when you work out further details of your project plan, schedule regular upcoming meetings with your mentor, get your development environment set up and start to engage with the project’s open source community. This is the time to work with your mentor on setting expectations for your interactions and how your progress is measured during the GSoC program. Hopefully, you have already participated in many discussions with your mentor, clarifying the project and expectations during the application period, but now is the time to finalize your plans.”

How this period went for me?

It really fulfilled everything it was supposed to. Hats off to Google for this initiative of adding an extra month in the timeline. So, In my whole project, I had most of the things figured out, like what will go in, what will go out, how will it be structured and implemented. Despite this, it follows a big BUT…

But a very crucial and challenging task is to port reproject from astropy. It’s like the most important feature of the project and requires some complex work like understanding the python version and figuring out a Julian way to write it. When I tried looking at how will I achieve it during the Application preparation period of GSoC, I got the feeling of how complex it was. It requires many indirect python functions and I was confused then. This was the only part I was unsure about and it was a crucial requirement of the project too. Both me and my mentor agree on this part of the project being tricky.

So, I decided to give as much time as possible to understand this part of the code in CBP. Also, I just wanted to finish with this part and move to implement all the cool features I proposed as soon as possible. In the CBP itself, I started porting it line by line, getting stuck many times. I tried to understand the whole structure of the reproject and broke it down into different segments. I created a tree structure of things which needs to go in order. I started investigating the things which are required in this project but not present in Julia, for getting a better idea of the scope this project carries.

For the project, I had to gain knowledge about WCS, so I wrote down a guide to WCS.jl package which motivated me to learn about it and this will help others to gain an understanding of the package too as it lacks proper documentation. Next was a scheduled video conference with the mentors over Google Hangouts. I was a little nervous about meeting them for the very first time apart from our chats at riot. I was a little unsure about their expectation. I had some doubts about the project as I already started some coding. So we discussed the project structure, a little about each other, some things about astronomy and my doubts. Talking to them gave me new insights and direction to move further.

By the end of CBP, I have understood the reproject part well and gained enough confidence and knowledge to complete it. I have 2-3 weeks for it but I think I might just finish it in a week.

Also, I recently saw my handle aquatiko listed on the OpenAstronomy Universe Page, feels really great to be part of this community. This period has surely given me a head start in my project and a boost to finish up the most complex part lined at the start.

And from today (27th May) the Coding period starts…