How it all started?

This is my first blog, and I am happy to announce that I have been selected for GSoC’21 as a part of ArviZ under the NumFOCUS umbrella of organizations. I am very excited for the summers, and I would be updating my work, findings, and cool stuff every two weeks.

Ok, let start from the very beginning. So it was in February, I was googling here and there for my Probabilistic Inference and Modelling course assignment when I came through ArviZ. I found that it was a tool used for the visualization of Bayesian models. Just out of curiosity, I went through some of its docs, and I loved it. I also went through its wiki and found that it would be participating in GSoC’21. This encouraged me even further to contribute to the organization. So I made a PR regarding a slight documentation change, and it was merged on 15th of February. I know you people might be thinking, “Oh! you have just tweaked their documentation, so why are you mentioning the slightest detail like when it was merged” but it was a great achievement for me as it was my first PR in the open-source community. I had wished for it in my first year itself but couldn’t do it due to academic pressure and also lack of motivation. Also, I always wanted to try for GSoC but was a bit late in my second year and in my third year; I already had an internship, and also academics was a big deal in my third year as the CGPA plays a significant role in the placements. But, now in my fourth and final year, after my placements and less academic load, I had ample time to prepare for GSoC, so I went for it.

So I spent the entire March making small contributions and checking every minute if the PR was getting merged or not. I remember, almost every evening before going out to play I would submit a PR or make some changes on an existing PR and would always check for any notifications regarding it every 5 minutes while playing. It was a fun experience, and I loved it. I want to thank Oriol, who was very kind and helpful and always replied to my silly questions. This is what is lovely about Open Source that every individual is ready to help on anything, and they do not have any expectations, so there is no pressure on the student, and we can work freely. So I ended up choosing the project Adding new Plots to ArviZ and submitted the proposal. Thanks to Oriol and Osvaldo, who reviewed it multiple times :). So the project aims to implement some more cool plots in the library for Bayesian Inference visualization. Also I after GSoC, I am thinking of writing some cool blogs on ArviZ, Machine Learning and NLP. I also loved Competitive Programming in my 2nd year, so I will also write tutorials for it. Competitive Programming is essential if you are aiming for placement in the SDE profile. I would suggest every fresher to start CP from the first year itself. I was a bit late and started it in 2nd year, but that’s ok as well. Also, if you are looking to go deep into Bayesian Statistics using ArviZ and PyMC3, please check out my mentor Osvaldo Martin’s book - Bayesian Analysis with Python: Introduction to Statistical Modeling and Probabilistic Programming Using PyMC3 and ArviZ.

These days, I am going through the plots module and reading some documentation in the ArviZ library to grasp how the existing plots are implemented and alongside will solve relevant issues. Apart from this, familiarizing myself with the people in ArviZ which is the main motive of community bonding and looking forward to this long summer.