This will be my first relevant post chronicling my journey so far.
I was on the lookout for a relevant internship and experience a few months ago, when my friend Ankur (GitHub) suggested that I look into Google Summer of Code. Ankur had completed his SoC with an organization called SciRuby a year ago. SciRuby maintains an eponymous library in Ruby whose main user demographic is the scientific community, and by extension, the mathematician community as well. It is a FOSS organization, meaning it develops open source software for the benefit of one and all.
I have to say, I really liked the concept. I am also aware of how development experience can bring clarity in the understanding of a programming language. Since I had just begun on Python, I decided to find an organization and communicate with them. A month and a couple of pull requests later, I’ve begun collaborating with SunPy. SunPy is a FOSS organization that maintains the Python library for solar physics. This library includes functionality to view, parse and extrapolate solar image data as is required by the scientific community. It began as a concentrated effort to build an open-source alternative to SolarSoft, which is commercial software written in IDL.
I was introduced to a bunch of amiable and enthusiastic folks on #sunpy (irc), some of whom are Stuart Mumford, David Perez-Suarez, Jack Ireland, Simon Liedtke, etc. They sure take their development work seriously, and I have personally experienced this on one of their Hangouts meetings, where they dissected what they had accomplished so far and how they wanted to proceed. I had never been on a live conference call with people of nationalities different to mine before, so it was quite the experience. I was the silent spectator to their hustle and bustle!
I’m looking forward to getting a chance to working with them, and contributing something of note to their organization. My childhood fascination of astronomy would finally have paid off then!
My GSoC Journey 