Week 5 & 6 - The Work You Don't See 👀

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🔍 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 spectrogram classes into their own homes.

This ended up covering instruments like CALLISTO, WAVES, EOVSA, PSP RFS, Solar Orbiter RPW, SWAVES, RSTN and ILOFAR.


💬 The Best Part? Code Reviews 

One thing I've started appreciating more during GSoC is how much learning happens after opening a pull request.

Several rounds of review helped improve the implementation through better type hints, cleaner property definitions, improved documentation and a simpler overall API.

Every review felt less like someone pointing out mistakes and more like someone helping shape a better design.

That has honestly been one of my favourite parts of this project.

🔧 The Unexpected Detour

No GSoC week is complete without a surprise.

While working on the project, I noticed that the Read the Docs builds were failing. After a bit of digging, I traced the issue back to the deprecation of mambaforge.

That small investigation ended up leading to fixes not only for radiospectra, but also for the upstream SunPy package template, helping future projects using the template as well.

Definitely not something I expected to be working on... but that's part of the fun of open source.


🌱 A Small Reflection

These past two weeks reminded me that some of the most valuable contributions aren't the ones users immediately notice.

Sometimes progress looks like cleaner architecture.

Sometimes it looks like better tests.

Sometimes it's fixing CI.

Sometimes it's learning from your mistakes.

Sometimes it's simply making the next contributor's job a little easier.

And honestly, I think that's one of the things I'm enjoying most about GSoC.

Looking forward to the next chapter! 🚀

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