Week 1 of GSoC

Week 1 of GSoC is done! 😎

This was a huge week filled with excitement and hard work—and of course, there were challenges to be overcome.

The following is a short progress report of this week’s work.

Finished

• started a new branch of Makie.jl at aw/documentation for my work during GSoC
• implemented a help function and other helper functions, including help_arguments and help_attributes.
  • help can be used by calling help(::Function) or help(::Type{T}) on a plotting function or a plot type, and returns a list of the accepted function signatures and keyword arguments (attributes).

  • extended is an optional keyword argument (default = false) that can in addition print out the default values of the plot attributes:

      julia> help(Makie.Scatter; extended = true)
      Makie.scatter has the following function signatures:
    
        (Vector, Vector)
        (Vector, Vector, Vector)
        (Matrix)
      Available attributes and their defaults for Makie.Scatter are:
    
        colormap        nothing
        colorrange      nothing
        fxaa            false
        glowcolor       RGBA{N0f8}(0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0)
        glowwidth       0.0
        ...
    

  • in addition, these help functions take an io stream as input, so the output can be redirected to an output file, for example (this may be useful for future plans!)
• pushed four commits related to this, fb0f166, b08e000, 9d2218e, and 31835c3.
• met with mentor twice this week and worked together to define tasks for this week / next week, and to solve some problems I ran into this week.

TODOs

• one of next week’s first TODOs is to check out Plots.jl and see what available function arguments they support, e.g.

    plot(AbstractArray, AbstractArray; kw_args...)
    plot(AbstractArray, AbstractArray, AbstractArray; kw_args...)
    plot(AbstractArray, AbstractArray, Function; kw_args...)
  

Difficulties encountered

• I encountered some difficulties in estimating the time I needed to accomplish some tasks, and also some difficulties finding time to solidly work on GSoC. I’ve discussed this with my mentor and we have plans and goals in place to rectify this starting the next week.

So, that’s it for today’s post! Onwards to the next week!

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_{Image source: Google Summer of Code, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0}