Chapter 0

Pre-GSoC Phase

??? - 20th May, 2022

I first started searching for organisations back in January. After extensive research, I found OpenAstronomy to be quite interesting and joined the Slack channel. I was looking at the sub-organisations in OpenAstronomy, and joined their individual Slack channels as well. It was around this time that I started looking at the issues of the sub-orgs. I was very new to open-source, hence even basic stuff like issuing PR’s and tackling simple good-first-issues was challenging.

After looking at the codebase and the issues a bit, and engaging with the community on Slack, I found RADIS to be a fitting place for me.

I started solving some of the good first issues; during the pre-GSoC phase, I added some links to the RADIS Flowchart. This was quite simple, and I solved it easily, thus earning myself my first contribution! I also tried to solve another good issue, which involved adding the feature of a “cutoff error” parameter to the code. I committed the first simple changes to the codebase, but my approach was wrong. Dr. Erwan suggested a much more elegant approach, and so I worked on that a bit. However, I wrote the code in a very basic and simple way, making use of lists everywhere. I have yet to implement those changes in the form of Numpy Arrays, which will make the code faster and improve readability.