Weeks 7-8

I just counted and so far I have 14 merged pull requests which makes me really happy! Not all of them are huge PRs, a few of them are minor documentation changes but some of them took a bit more time to work on as I was implementing some new feature in WCSAxes or fixing some bug.

The latest thing I've been working on is integrating WCSAxes into APLpy. So APLpy is an Astropy affiliated package that also plots astronomical images and uses matplotlib for all the plotting tasks. My current task is to make changes to APLpy so that it uses WCSAxes to locate and plot all the ticks, labels, grids etc instead. So far things have been going pretty smoothly. Most of the functionality of APLpy is in place - there are a few small things here and there but I'm not too worried now that it's mostly working. Things have been going so smoothly in fact that I started to get a little bored with the work and consequently, my productivity decreased significantly.

Tom, my mentor, was at a conference this week so I haven't had a Hangout with him and discuss my latest work, which might also be why I haven't been very productive this week. I think my brain perceives our weekly Hangouts as deadlines where I have to report on my progress and that keeps me motivated. I like deadlines - there I said it! Well maybe having stressful deadlines all the time wouldn't be very pleasant but deadlines are kind of fun. They keep you focused and there's that edgy feeling you get close to the deadline 'can I finish this in time?!' Usually I just set my own personal deadlines like 'I have to get this thing done in two days, maximum four days' etc and that keeps me happy but like I said, I got a little bored.

Towards the end of the week, Tom said I could try implementing another feature in WCSAxes if I wanted so I decided to focus on that instead. Currently WCSAxes only plots major ticks but it would be useful if it could plot minor ticks as well.

(In case someone doesn't know about major and minor ticks from matplotlib, the red ticks are minor ticks and the black ones are major ticks. Also this is just an image produced with matplotlib, not WCSAxes)

This is a bit tricky because so far I haven't had to actually understand the math behind WCSAxes' calculations but now might be the right time to understand how it works. I currently have a very faulty implementation of minor ticks but it's fun to work on and hopefully I'll figure it out! :)