My experience as a Google Summer of Code intern with IOOS

In November I finished my Google of Summer Code project at IOOS. The final report goes into detail about the project that I worked on, the number of commits and pull requests that I’ve made, and the scope of my code changes.

During GSoC 2022 I had the opportunity to work on erddapy, the Python client for the ERDDAP data server. My main efforts were directed at refactoring erddapy so that its basic functionalities can be reused by downstream packages, and by future functionality that will be implemented. This will be incredibly beneficial to projects such as argopy and gliderpy that use erddapy as a backend to retrieve data from ERDDAP instances. Future directions for erddapy will include adding an array-like interface that allows easy subsetting and slicing of datasets.

Working on this project allowed me to gain a much better understanding of how web requests and network protocols work, and ways to implement those with different Python libraries, such as httpx and requests. I also learned a lot about ERDDAP, which in my case is very useful as I am setting up an ERDDAP server of my own as part of a collaboration from my PhD. Working with the ins-and-outs of ERDDAP data by developing erddapy has been immensely helpful for that.

In addition to the technical knowledge, I believe that perhaps the greatest benefit of participating in GSoC was the experience of working as part of an open-source software development team. I believe that working as a team is a critical aspect of software development, and one that is frequently overlooked in the development of academic research software, where many scientists develop software by themselves without having code reviews, rigorous Continuous Integration standards, comprehensive unit tests, and so on (at least that is my impression as a graduate student in the field of bioinformatics).

In summary, I immensely enjoyed my experience as a GSoC intern at IOOS. I learned a lot about Python web requests, ERDDAP data, and improved my development workflow by writing good commit messages, creating contextual pull requests, and discussing the feedback I received on my code reviews. I am very grateful to my mentors, Filipe and Alex, for their patience and willingness to do thorough reviews of my contributions and to discuss nitty-gritty details of their package. This internship has also been useful to my PhD as I will be using a lot of ERDDAP (and consequently, erddapy!) to acquire environmental data to model ocean microbial communities. I highly recommend IOOS as an organisation for future applicants of GSoC, especially if they are interested in quantitative marine sciences and the open source tools that go with it.