My experience as a Google Summer of Code intern — mid project update

I’m excited to announce that in this month of September I have completed the first half of my Google of Summer of Code project at IOOS, “Refactoring of erddapy into separate core and object layers”. This year, GSoC projects may be extended to up to 22 weeks, which was something that really helped me. Given that I am in the Southern Hemisphere, I didn’t have a long Summer break, so being able to extend the project has greatly improved my ability to conciliate the internship’s activities with my responsibilities as a PhD student. I was able to dedicate my time to my qualifying exam in early July — the coding portion of GSoC started in June — and after passing my exam, I could dedicate my time to GSoC.

About the project

erddapy is the Python client for the ERDDAP REST API. While erddapy initially served only as a client to offer programmatic access to ERDDAP’s API by programmatically building URLs and searching servers, it has since evolved to be used by downstream packages, such as gliderpy and argopy. The goal of our project is to separate the core, bare-bones functions of erddapy from the higher-level, opinionated classes that offer more advanced functionalities. While the core layer will offer the URL building and data transformation functions that can be used by the downstream packages, the opinionated layer will offer high-level objects for searching servers and manipulating datasets as Pandas-like objects with a chainable API, in constrast with the transformational API of the current version of erddapy.

The first half of the project was mainly concerned with restructuring the erddapy package that will allow the refactoring to happen, and making sure that the changes are backwards-compatible with the downstream packages. At time of writing, a total of 12 PRs have been made to erddapy, with around 50 commits. I have also made a small PR to gliderpy to ensure backwards-compatibility with the new version of erddapy.

Working with IOOS on this Google Summer of Code project has been fantastic so far. One of the highlights for me is practicing making tidy, contextual PRs to a codebase that I (initially) was not familiar with, which is usually the reality of most software-focused jobs. Although this is not part of the GSoC project, I also volunteered as a helper at the satellite event of the OceanHackWeek 2022. This was a great opportunity to connect with the ocean sciences community, and to have some insights on how oceanographers use research software such as erddapy on their day-to-day activities. I’m very much looking forward to working on the second half of the project and to continue to contribute to open source packages in the ocean sciences.