[Numpy-discussion] GSOC 2010

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:11 PM, <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Charles R Harris
>> <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> >
>> > I don't feel that numpy/scipy did as well in GSOC 2009 as it could
>> > have.  I
>> > think this was mostly due to lack of preparation on our part, we weren't
>> > ready when the students started showing up on the lists. So I would like
>> > to
>> > put together a selection of suitable projects and corresponding mentors
>> > that
>> > we could put on the wiki somewhere and advertise. Just to start things
>> > off,
>> > here are two things that come to mind.
>> >
>> > Python 3k transition. I think it is time to start looking at this
>> > seriously.
>> > Best of breed special functions in cython. These could be part of a
>> > separate
>> > numpy extras package where code is restricted to C, Cython, and Python.
>> >
>> > Thoughts?
>>
>> for scipy: more stats, gsoc2009 went very well.
>>
>
> Yes, it seems so. I had the impression that planning for that project was
> undertaken pretty early on with the involvement of Skipper. What exactly
> *was* the history of that project and what can we learn from it?

Skipper started early in the preparation, and with the help of Allan and me
had a pretty concrete proposal. Because of final exams, the actual work
on statsmodels started a bit late.

>From my perspective a few issues that helped:

Skipper, Alan and I have the same background (in econometrics), so I knew
roughly what knowledge I could expect.
Skipper was willing and able to work his way through several textbooks
for the models that he, and I, didn't know much (or anything) about.

"Cleaning up stats.models" was a relatively well defined project, with
relatively easy to define goals.

I kept reminding him about writing tests, and to verify results with other
packages, so that we knew when we had a model "correctly" cleaned
up. Skipper spend a lot of time on this.

For most parts, I worked on the code in parallel with him, checking
on his progress, looking at the problems we had with matching
the results of the other statistical packages, finding bugs and
writing some draft code. During July, August we had almost daily
long email threads.
I think, this helped a lot, so that Skipper didn't get stuck or sidetracked,
and that I was able to keep up with the changes (and learn some of
the statistical background).

Josef

>
> Chuck
>
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