Friday, June 17, 2016

Getting feedback and planning

This last week has been a productive one for me, in coding, communication and understanding the underlying framework used in astroplan. My mentors mentors Eric Jeschke, Brett Morris, and Erik Tollerud have helped me in coming up with tasks that give me a better understanding of the code and expectations while adding to astroplan. The main piece of work that I did is on a constraint that distinguished between dark grey and bright time. While writing it, I gained a better understanding of how constraints are used in astroplan and how to write tests for them. The comments on that, and a doc page for terminology that we use have, helped me understand the importance of communication is for this project. There are many other astronomers who have a better understanding of syntax and expectations than I do who can help me understand when an error occurs or a description is ambiguous.

I'm starting work on the scheduling side of things and my first task was to write out how I would imagine working with the scheduler would look like. Right now it looks like https://github.com/astropy/astroplan/pull/178, though it might change from feedback and discussion. At the code level, I'm starting to work on creating a schedule class that the schedulers can interact with.

2 comments:

  1. Karl! I'm very happy you've understood the importance of communication and that it helped you to get insights in your code. That's very important in any scientific area, not just in astronomy... but sadly many don't understand the advantages that it gives. Even there's people that is secretive even. That's what I like of open source projects and how they are reshaping science into open science.

    Keep having fun and adding cool stuff to astroplan.

    PS. It would be easier for the reader if you use hyperlinks instead of the link itself (eg. to the PRs). Also, it looks better if you hide the links into the text - for example:
    The main piece of work that I did is https://github.com/astropy/astroplan/pull/174
    could be written as:
    As the main piece of work that I did.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for your suggestion, I've added the hyperlinks.

      Delete