Quick Update - Friday, 29 May 2015

Quick update!

Today I:

1.  Wrote up core.py, code that will serve as a starting place for the core of astroplan, our observation planning toolbox.  
2. I also modified index.rst in astroplan/docs, which serves as a documentation hub for existing code, including the hierarchy of classes and methods. 
3. Made a PR for the modified files.
4. Still working on figuring out how Sphinx documentation works...

The Real Work Starts Now

Since my last post, several things have happened:

1) I got accepted to Google Summer of Code 2015 (yaaayy!!!)

2) The project I ended up choosing, telescope observation planning with Python and Astropy, has been in the planning stages for the last month.  Another student who joined the project, Brett Morris, was also accepted to GSoC, and together with our mentors, we've started to plan out the structure of the code, also known as the API.

3) I've been playing around with existing observation planning packages in Python to prepare for the project (namely Skyfield).

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So, my first major task is to build the documentation for code that acts as a mock API.  

This came in part out of my need (as a newcomer to structured, open source coding) to better visualize and understand the hierarchy of classes, methods, etc. that make up the strawman API we're using to plan out the code base. 

I'll be using Sphinx to build these documents, as it's what Astropy and affiliated packages use.  The minimum you need to build visualization such as this class inheritance diagram is a skeleton code of placeholders for future, working functions.

My battle plan:

• Make one .py file with function placeholders & index.rst file
• Put it: https://github.com/astroplanners/astroplan/tree/master/astroplan   
• python setup.py build_sphinx

 
Some resources:

• http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/development/docguide.html
• http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/cosmology/index.html
• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/master/docs/cosmology/index.rst
• http://sphinx-doc.org/