GSoC is now over, and I have officially passed the Final Evaluations :-).
Looking back, this was an amazingly interesting and exciting process, and helped me learn a lot about SymPy, and also Python. Quite a few things that I learnt in the last three months (some resulting from my own coding, others from just messing around with SymPy code) were so full of Python 'magic' that I wondered whether I would ever use them again in any of my own work!
There were a few problems, like dealing with architectural difficulties, physics-related problems (that I had not though of while writing my proposal) and the radical change in the plan of action mid-way through the GSoC period. This change came because Prasoon's module didn't shape up as we had planned earlier- perhaps we underestimated the difficulties associated with creating such a complex module and integrating it with the rest of the codebase. As a result the code I had written based on our decided API became useless - almost. Thankfully, while coding all the new stuff (a mechanics core to support fields, electrostatics, a unified class for ReferenceFrame and Particle) I had made a modified version of the mechanics core to test it all on. Hence, Gilbert and I decided around July end that the best thing to do would be to modify the current framework accordingly and base all my work on it.
After the mid-sem evals, I could not work as hard as I had during my vacations due to projects and course-work at college. Inspite of all that, I managed to get two PRs merged...one modifying sympy.physics.mechanics.essential to support scalar and vector fields, and other to add a big function to the functions.py file to calculate motion attributes from time-dependent vectors and boundary conditions.
I have a few more PRs in the pipeline, these would essentially just modify the code I wrote over the summer to work with the current module and add the documentation for the done work. The first one of them is already in the review process :-)
The help from Gilbert, Jason, Stefan and at times even Aaron, has been immense, and I am really thankful to them for it. Gilbert was a great mentor, especially while brainstorming solutions to problems that we faced from time to time. It was almost like solving problems with a college and getting tips to understand how some difficulties could be resolved.
Obviously, I will continue to work for SymPy (mainly sympy.logic) and PyDy - though mostly PyDy for the foreseeable future, since I have to add the E-M module and extend it as I had envisioned earlier. It would be fun to code complex electromagnetic concepts to work with dynamic systems, and having Jason, Gilbert and DL Peterson (and the rest of the PyDy team) to help would be quite the experience on its own.
For me, GSoC has just started my involvement with this community and its codebase, and I aim to be an active developer for them :-D Physics is one of the few things that I miss being in Computer Science, so writing Python code based on it in my free time is something that I am obviously looking forward to!
I will keep updating my blog as and when I get something merged or I work on something that's worth writing about. Once again, thanks a lot to SymPy, Gilbert, Aaron, Ondrej, Stefan and obviously- Google and Carol, for this amazing opportunity!
Looking back, this was an amazingly interesting and exciting process, and helped me learn a lot about SymPy, and also Python. Quite a few things that I learnt in the last three months (some resulting from my own coding, others from just messing around with SymPy code) were so full of Python 'magic' that I wondered whether I would ever use them again in any of my own work!
There were a few problems, like dealing with architectural difficulties, physics-related problems (that I had not though of while writing my proposal) and the radical change in the plan of action mid-way through the GSoC period. This change came because Prasoon's module didn't shape up as we had planned earlier- perhaps we underestimated the difficulties associated with creating such a complex module and integrating it with the rest of the codebase. As a result the code I had written based on our decided API became useless - almost. Thankfully, while coding all the new stuff (a mechanics core to support fields, electrostatics, a unified class for ReferenceFrame and Particle) I had made a modified version of the mechanics core to test it all on. Hence, Gilbert and I decided around July end that the best thing to do would be to modify the current framework accordingly and base all my work on it.
After the mid-sem evals, I could not work as hard as I had during my vacations due to projects and course-work at college. Inspite of all that, I managed to get two PRs merged...one modifying sympy.physics.mechanics.essential to support scalar and vector fields, and other to add a big function to the functions.py file to calculate motion attributes from time-dependent vectors and boundary conditions.
I have a few more PRs in the pipeline, these would essentially just modify the code I wrote over the summer to work with the current module and add the documentation for the done work. The first one of them is already in the review process :-)
The help from Gilbert, Jason, Stefan and at times even Aaron, has been immense, and I am really thankful to them for it. Gilbert was a great mentor, especially while brainstorming solutions to problems that we faced from time to time. It was almost like solving problems with a college and getting tips to understand how some difficulties could be resolved.
Obviously, I will continue to work for SymPy (mainly sympy.logic) and PyDy - though mostly PyDy for the foreseeable future, since I have to add the E-M module and extend it as I had envisioned earlier. It would be fun to code complex electromagnetic concepts to work with dynamic systems, and having Jason, Gilbert and DL Peterson (and the rest of the PyDy team) to help would be quite the experience on its own.
For me, GSoC has just started my involvement with this community and its codebase, and I aim to be an active developer for them :-D Physics is one of the few things that I miss being in Computer Science, so writing Python code based on it in my free time is something that I am obviously looking forward to!
I will keep updating my blog as and when I get something merged or I work on something that's worth writing about. Once again, thanks a lot to SymPy, Gilbert, Aaron, Ondrej, Stefan and obviously- Google and Carol, for this amazing opportunity!
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