Balance

“Cosmic Balance” — completely unrelated type of balance to what I go on to talk to talk about in this post. Although, outer space looks all fancy and it goes well with the theme of OpenAstronomy.

From all my previous posts, it is quite evident that I obsess over small and insignificant details, mainly directed towards how my life is going to be in the future and this entire concept of “happiness”. However, the past few months of working with Sunpy has brought about this odd sense of calm. The entire feeling of stress being an emotion goes out the window. Maybe this is what doing something you love, maybe it’s the people — or maybe it’s just extremely good timing combined with coincidence.

Ah, I suppose these questions don’t have simple answers. Regardless, whatever I’m doing with right now has restored that balance that I was longing for.

Coming to what has been happening with sunkit-pyvista. To summarize, I spent an entire week fixing things that I caused due to over-confidence :)

Aside from that, I think I’m nearing the end of this project. A few bits of functionality has to be added in but for the most part, I think it’s all in there.

1. Saving and loading entire scenes are now possible with the work that we’ve done. This took quite a bit of time and it was pretty interesting to see how we could extend functionality to such massive extents.
2. We uncovered a few hidden issues that may have occurred because of me. Ones such as ill-defined tests because I may have been slightly over-confident with how I write code.
3. Quite a bit of time was spent resolving these issues, but I can definitely conclude that it was well worth the effort and I certainly learnt my lesson.
4. Figure tests are now a thing, we drew some parallels with Pyvista’s code and structured our own figure testing methodology which makes it easier for us to visually identify any mishaps in our plots. After all, we’re creating a library for data visualization. It’d be sad if our code tests pass and we’re under the assumption that everything is working fine (yet another dig at myself for not writing efficient tests).
5. I can safely say that Sunkit-Pyvista is quite balanced and usable now, or at least I hope so.

Getting back to how this might be the last few PRs of this project under the whole “GSoC timeline”, this makes me both sad and happy. It’s saddening to see that something I worked towards for over 6 months has kind of come to an end. Happy because I’ve gotten to work with some of the best developers and I genuinely enjoyed every bit of it. This offsets the balance in my life, but I think we may have a solution to this?