And GSoC is over..

This has been a really hard blog post to write for me because every time I would sit down to write something, I'd feel sad about my Summer of Code ending. I've had a such great time working on my project for the summer! It was different from anything I'd ever worked on before, it was challenging but not so much that I'd want to pull my hair out in frustration and on top of that, it was relevant to my own academic interests.

Overall, I've pretty much finished what I'd said in my proposal. Though there was one thing which I never got to, working with NDData, an Astropy class sort of similar to Numpy arrays but since NDData is still under development, we decided to not focus on it. Other than that, I worked on adding a lot of other features and fixed bugs as we discovered them, something which I didn't anticipate in the beginning but took up a significant bit of my summer (in a good way of course). WCSAxes is now in a pretty good place - we did our first release in early July and I just released a second version last week with some bug fixes and new features. I also have write access to the repository now! :D Integration of WCSAxes into APLpy is also pretty much finished. There is one non-trivial issue we need to find a solution to but it's of a low priority so it's fine.

There have been some roadblocks along the way, but nothing too unmanageable. If I did get stuck, my mentor was there to help me figure things out. This is where I should thank my mentor, Tom, for always being available and supportive, explaining things clearly and just being great to work with! :) 

I'm also planning to continue working on WCSAxes once GSoC is over or maybe see if I can contribute to something else for Astropy or an Astropy affiliated package, but that also depends on how much work there is for me to do and if it fits me. I really hope I do find things to work on because I've learned so much about the tools available in Python for astronomers by working with Astropy. 

Well that's it, I guess. I hope you've enjoyed reading about my summer!