Modernising radiospectra

Making Spectrograms a Little Easier to Work With Another couple of weeks have gone by and it's been a mix of writing code, responding to reviews and learning more about the radiospectra codebase. Compared to the first few weeks, I spent less time figuring out where things lived and more time thinking about how people actually use the library. That shift has been really fun because even small improvements can make a noticeable difference for users.

What Six Weeks of GSoC Have Taught Me 🚀 "I came into GSoC thinking I'd spend most of my time writing code. Six weeks later, I realized that's only a small part of the journey." A few days ago, I successfully passed my Google Summer of Code 2026 midterm evaluation 🎉 and it felt like the perfect time to look back on everything that's happened over the past six weeks. I've been working with the SunPy community on radiospectra  and honestly, this experience has been very different from what I expected. Sure, I've written code, opened pull requests and fixed bugs - but that's only part of the story. The bigger lesson has been learning how an open-source project is built and how people from different parts of the world collaborate to make it better. So instead of another weekly update, I thought I'd share a few things this journey has taught me so far. Learning a Large Codebase Takes Time ⌚ When I opened the repository for the first time,...

🔍 Behind the Scenes Users probably won't notice most of the work from these past two weeks... and that's completely okay. When people think about open source, it's easy to imagine exciting new features, shiny visual changes, or new capabilities. This wasn't one of those weeks. Instead, I spent the last two weeks working on something that's much less visible but just as important - making radiospectra easier to maintain, easier to extend and hopefully a little easier for future contributors to understand. 🏗️ Building a Better Metadata System The biggest piece of work was redesigning how metadata is handled across the package. Instead of relying on plain dictionaries everywhere, I introduced a proper metadata architecture using SpectrogramMetaABC and SpectrogramMeta , backed by NDCube's NDMeta . Once the foundation was in place, I gradually added dedicated metadata classes for each supported instrument, moving instrument-specific logic out of the sp...