Well, things have been busy lately! As reported back in May, I’ve been participating in Google Summer of Code which has now wrapped up. This was very rewarding for me, but today I want to share a guest post by Erick Oduniyi, the very talented student on the project. Bryan

Checking in from Kansas!

This past summer (2020) I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC or GSOC). As stated on the the GSOC website, GSOC is a “global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open-source organization on a 3-month programming project during their break from school.”

This was a particularly meaningful experience as it was my last undergraduate summer internship. I’m a senior studying computer engineering at the University of Kansas, and at the beginning of the summer I still didn’t feel super comfortable working on public (open-source) projects. So, I thought this program would help build my confidence as a computer and software engineer. Moreover:

• I wanted to work with the R organization because that is my favorite programming language.
• I wanted to work with r-hyperspec because I thought that would be the most impactful in terms of practicing project management and software ecosystem development.

In the process I hoped to:

• Become proficient using Git/Github, including continuous integration
• Become proficient in using Trello
• Become proficient in using R
• Become familiar with the spectroscopy community
• Become inspired to code more
• Become inspired to document and write more open source projects.
• Become excited to collaborate more across various industrial, academic, and community domains.

And through a lot of hard work all of those things came to be! Truthfully, even though the summer project was successful there is still a lot of work to do:

• Fortify hyperSpec for baseline with bridge packages
• Fortify hyperSpec for EMSC with bridge packages
• Fortify hyperSpec for matrixStats with bridge packages.

So, I’m excited to continue to work with the team! I think there are a ton of ideas I and the team have and hopefully we will get to explore them in deeper context. Speaking of the team, I have them to thank for an awesome GSOC 2020 experience. If you are interested in the journey that was the GSoC 2020 experience (perhaps you might be interested in trying the program next year), then please feel free to jump around here to get a feel for the things that I learned and how I worked with the r-hyperspec team this summer.

Best, E. Oduniyi