Project Progress

Coming back from spring break, I have been slow to get back into the flow of school work, so progress has been slow. The development enviorment is set up from my home computer, which is a challenge, because that means I can only work on it at home, and not on my laptop in the library as I am usually accustomed to doing my work. However, this is no longer a limitation, as I have rearanged my work station at home and my habits so that I generally work from my desk at home as opposed to the library in order to be able to work on contributing to pandas more often.

Finding issues is a lot more daunting than I expected. Despite having thousands of issues, it is hard to find issues that are perfect to contribute to. I found one issue that seemed relatively easy, and seemed to be a small inconsistency in the documentation. Once I looked into the code for this issue, I was confused, so I commented in the issue. Soon after, someone responded, and it seems like the issue has already been resolved. Although nothing I did got merged into pandas, and I did not contribute any code, looking at things from a positive perspective, I managed to help bring to attention an open issue, and helped them realise that they could close it, and now there is one less open issue.

We also attended a pandas contributors meeting. The meeting was open to everyone, but other than our class group, only a couple of core mantainers were present in the meeting. It was a very interesting opportunity to listen to people who knew a lot about what they were doing, and how core contributors made decisions about how to resolve issues and move forward with their project. We got to introduce ourselves, but the meeting was mostly them discussing amongst themselves about issues they were working on, and suggestions and information sharing about how to fix things.

Even though I did not technically contribute to any documentation, I think I am ready to move on from it, and understand the pandas codebase a little more and find an issue that involves writing code. At the moment, I am not too optimistic about contributing to a major change, but I hope that I can make several small contributions that will hopefully reflect well on my effort in the class.