Welcome to My Blog!

It finally happened. I have now been made a cog in the machine that is GSoC.

This page will now exists as a platform for my peers and future colleagues to enjoy my GSoC journey. Whether it be failed pull requests, frustrating unsquashed commits or just simple grammar mistakes, I hope it will be helpful for all who endeavour to contribute to open source and academia.

What is GSoC?

GSoC (or Google Summer of Code) is a global online project run by Google. The focus of GSoC is to attract contributors to the open-source software space. By allowing organisations to sumbit projects and accompanying mentors, GSoC empowers newcomers to the contribute to the vast and unknown world of open source software projects.

Project Selection

The project that I have selected to apply for is called radiospectra. Radiospectra is a Python software package for reading and plotting radio spectrogram data from various ground and space based solar radio observatories. Radiospectra also forms a part of the SunPy library, a open-source solar data analysis environment.

During my 4th year research project I was suddenly faced with data that I had never worked with before! What is a .fit file? Why do they have headers? Why can’t I just use plt.plot(fitFile)? All wonderful questions that I did not have answers to. But the human spirit prevailed, or at least in that case radiospectra did.

Using radiospectra I was able to plot e-CALLISTO data that would be used as part of my Masters project later on. At the time it was, however, clear that radiospectra lacked some useful features. But to my mind all of these libraries were all created and packaged in these far away lands by coding fairies that sleep very little and see the Sun even less. So in the end I went my own way coding things as I needed them without real regard for future use.

Jumping to the present, I now find myself in a position where I can contribute to a package that I have used since I started my academic career! The most shocking part of it all? I could have been contributing that entire time.

The big lesson here is that it really is just that easy to start working on something! You just have to go looking in the right places and read a whole lot of docs.

As part of my PhD I will be working with solar radio data from the I-LOFAR radio station and hopefully other data sources in the future as well. Contributing and keeping track of the radiospectra package has become more important than ever as it will streamline a lot of my workflow. Hopefully community members using radiospectra will benefit long term as well.

What You Can Expect

I will be keeping blogs focused on my recent GSoc 2026 application process. Should I be accepted as a GSoC contributor for radiospectra, then there will be weekly updates kept on this blog.

While the goal of keeping blogs to have a publically accessible record of project goals, accomplishments and remaining tasks, I hope to offer a more personal view on the highs and lows of the journey. As the contributor guide aptly states: “If you think you know everything, then you are not good enough for GSoC!”.

From my point of view this can not be more true! It is simply the case that few university programs in the world a can tailor a program for students in such a way that they are entirely prepared for anything a new code base throws at them. To me, that makes this project all the more exciting. No experience is as valuable as hands on development and getting to interact with contributors who have been a part of the open source community.

So to ensure that readers get a representative view of what the GSoC experience is like, especially for someone who has a prior knowledge and experiences in coding, the blog posts will not only include project updates but also some of the hilarious pitfalls, mistakes and general misery that a lack of thorough reading can cause.

What’s Next?

In my coming post I’m planning to write about my first pull request made to SunPy/radiospectra.

Coden snapshot from my first PR!

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 elif ("SOLO" in cdf_globals.get("Project", "")[0]):
            data_type = cdf_globals.get("Data_type", [""])[0]
            data_descriptor = cdf_globals.get("Descriptor", "")[0]
            if ("RPW-HFR-SURV" not in data_descriptor
            and "RPW-TNR-SURV-FLUX" not in data_descriptor):
                    raise ValueError(
                        f"Currently radiospectra supports Level 2 HFR survey data "
                        "and Level 3 HFR, TNR survey data the file "
                        f'{file.name} is {cdf_globals.get("Logical_source_description", [""])[0]}'
                    )
            if("L3" in data_type):
                epoch = cdf.varget("Epoch")
                times = Time("J2000.0") + epoch * u.ns
                freqs = cdf.varget("FREQUENCY") << u.Unit(
                    cdf.varattsget("FREQUENCY")["UNITS"]
                )

My initial thought was that this would be a very simple job! I mean, how difficult can an elif be right? Keep a lookout for the next post to find out more!

Does he know?

Thanks for reading!