Community Bonding

Hi everyone, this is Piyush and I am here with the 2nd iteration of my series of blogs depicting my journey in the GSOC program. If you haven’t read my previous blog, you can do so here and keep up.

The accepted student projects for Google Summer of Code was announced on May 4th, 2020. I was happy and excited for being selected as student developer for NumFOCUS:ArviZ. The ArviZ team welcomed me into the organisation and guided me. In Google Summer of Code, before the actual coding period starts, we have community bonding period for about a month. In this period, we are supposed to communicate with the wide community and lay the ground plan for the project with the help of the mentors. My aim in this period was to refine the general idea,  try to formalise what exactly is needed to add a new feature or modify the existing features and discuss the proposed methodology with the mentors to make sure that no bad decisions are made early in the process, acquaint myself with the expectations and essential requirements through detailed interaction with the mentor and community.

I have proposed a schema of methods for InferenceData object in my proposal. It includes the possible method to extend in InferenceData along with some custom InferenceData methods. My proposed schema for methods in InferenceData object is:

I finalised above schema with the help of mentors and laid a three-month plan for the completion of the project. Also I got myself acquainted with the the modules being used in our library and the testing procedure, especially xarray and all the methods of xarray.Dataset. In ArviZ, we have monthly meetings called cafe inference, where random three to four persons are paired from the community to communicate with each other. I also attended one of these meeting and it proved to be very helpful for me to clear doubts about the project and have an overalll positive attitude towards my project