Google Summer of Code 2021 wrapped up in September with 45 students supporting NumFOCUS projects.
We queried the student cohort for their personal takeaways and received a near majority of responses from this talented group of burgeoning software developers. Keep reading for their takeaways from a summer spent coding and learning how open science projects work.
Freyam Mehta | Dask — Visualizing the Performance Characteristics of Computations
My greatest takeaway was the immense level of sophistication that can be achieved in a team environment. I really enjoyed learning how an organization functions and how things get done so smoothly.
Gagandeep Singh | LFortran — Supporting Arrays and Allocatables in LFortran
One takeaway from my time in GSoC is that writing compilers requires designing algorithms along with paying attention to ease of use for the end user. Overall, I think this project has made me a better programmer, problem solver and yeah, also a debugger too.
Rishabh Sanjay | ArviZ — Adding New Plots to ArviZ
During my GSoC experience, I interacted with different kinds of people from different backgrounds which helped me to gain experience both technologically and socially.
Lenka Hasova | PySAL — Competing destination for Spatial Interaction models
This has been a great experience! I’ve overcome my personal boundaries in coding and learned a lot about Python package development and the dev community. It has also in turn opened many doors for me.
Ahmed Khaled | PyTorch-Ignite — Engine Refactoring
GSoC was incredible, I won’t list all of the things I learned because of space and time constraints. I do wish to share that after I successfully completed the GSoC program, a company reached out to me for an internship, and now I am one of the core developers at PyTorch-Ignite.
Tomas Capretto | PyMC — Extend available models and default priors in Bambi
GSoC gave me a great opportunity to contribute code and be part of the open source community for which I’m very grateful for.
Frank Schäfer | SciML — Neural Hybrid Differential Equations and Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis
The Google Summer of Code 2021 project gave me the opportunity to collaborate with internationally renowned scientists and software developers of different backgrounds and allowed me to engage in cutting-edge software development during my studies.
Priyanshu Agarwal | PyBaMM — Printing Formatted Equations
This was the biggest project I’ve ever worked on. It was quite challenging as my project had me touch a large portion of the codebase but it also served as a great learning experience. I am thankful to everyone involved for providing me with such a wonderful experience. I also had a lot of fun working on this project.
Vasily Ilinl | SciML- Efficient Spatial Simulations in DiffEqJump
Through my experience with GSoC and the opportunities to work on various aspects of the project, I know I have furthered my growth and knowledge base as a software developer.
Aitik Gupta | Matplotlib: Revisiting Text/Font Handling Matplotlib
Learning how to use a library is one thing, but learning how to build one is quite another. The experience was unmatched, I learned more this summer than I had the previous academic year.
Saransh Chopra | PyBaMM — Automated Twitter bot to run PyBaMM Simulations
These ten weeks were absolutely amazing. Through my mentors, I learned a lot about coding, collaborating, writing documentation, unit testing, reviewing, and most of all, about open-source as a whole. Working with PyBaMM and NumFOCUS was definitely the best way I could’ve spent my summers!
Kush Kothari | Data Retriever- Adding Spatial Dataset Support to retrieverdash
Contributing to NumFOCUS was an awesome way to learn and grow while contributing meaningfully to open source data science projects. I can’t thank my mentors, the organization and GSoC organizers enough for this exposure!
Purva Thakre | QuTiP — Quantum Gate Decomposition for QuTiP
Writing code on my own is a lot different than contributing to an open source project. I am thankful to have learned and worked with a helpful community.
Dimitris Papageorgiou| NetworkX — Louvain Community Detection
GSoC gave me the opportunity to grow as a programmer while solving an interesting problem and also getting the opportunity to network with some really great people. Altogether it was a great experience!
Mohammad Hesam Shaelaie | JuMP — Expanding support for the solution of bilevel optimization problems in JuMP
I learned a lot about teamwork, Julia, Github, bilevel optimization, MibS, and MathOptInterface. Apart from that, I made some excellent friends and also found my way to a bigger bilevel optimization community.
Adam R. Jensen | pvlib — Making pvlib python a one-stop source for solar resource data
Participating in Google Summer of Code was the highlight of my summer and such an amazing learning experience!
Mohammed Jeeshan Sheikh | SciML — Discretizations of Partial Differential Equations
Writing memory efficient code along with learning additional aspects of coding such as memory allocations, code execution sequences, etc. were perhaps the most novel of takeaways for me. GSoC is a must have experience for any programming enthusiast!!
Aakash Chaudhary | Data Retriever — Support for Login/API
During my summer participating in GSoC, I further enhanced my design and implementation skills, and improved my communication skills. This beneficial program overall made me a better software developer.
Geetansh Saxena | Colour — Adding New Colour Models
GSoC 2021 gave me a chance to work on a project that is used by thousands of people. My greatest take away from the experience is when you think a problem is too big to solve, you are just standing too close to it.
Balaje K. | Gridap — A fast finite element interpolator in Gridap.jl
By participating in GSoC with Gridap, I was able to see how software packages are built and maintained using a version control system like Git. I also liked how Gridap.jl features are close to the mathematics of finite elements, which has several key advantages.
Thomas Statham | GeoPandas — Dask bridge to scale geospatial analysis
Having the opportunity to contribute to Geopandas was highly rewarding. My mentors from the project were encouraging and helped me to improve my skills and confidence when contributing and working on open source projects.
Meenal Jhajharia | PyMC — Extending Time-Series Models
GSoC ’21 was easily the most fruitful summer I have ever had. I met an amazing community at PyMC that I hope to work with for a long time to come.
Germano Barcelos dos Santos | PySal — Open Source Facility Location Modeling (spopt) Development
“When I saw the PySAL project in GitHub I became fascinated, but I wasn’t familiar with the broadness of the geospatial field. As such, I felt like I was exploring this new world that I had just discovered, especially location science which was one of the focus areas of my work during the summer.”
Larry Dong | PyMC Extending Time-Series Models
“My experience during GSoC was very enriching and it was definitely a highlight of my summer. I learned open source development and am happily continuing to work on the project that I started this summer.”
Arpan Parikh | PyTorch-Ignite — Improve Metric Module
This project taught me a lot about pytorch and its distributed environment. It also taught me technical skills such as Github Workflows.
Neel Sura | Stan — Lambert W Distributions in Stan
I learned how to implement a general model of data in Stan, which sounds simple, but is quite tricky to get right. My GSoC mentors supported me in carrying out this practice project.
