hamogu
commented
9 months ago Work will start in December for both contractors. One contract is signed, the other will will hopefully be done soon.
Open eteq opened 12 months ago
hamogu
commented
9 months ago Work will start in December for both contractors. One contract is signed, the other will will hopefully be done soon.
jdswinbank
commented
8 months ago Could somebody (Erik? Moritz?) please post a status update here, in particular including the names of the contractors (so we know who to look out for when they are invoicing). Thanks!
hamogu
commented
8 months ago See full details in the annoucement to astropy dev (https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/astropy-dev/c/dw_ej0dqLgQ). Parts of the text are copied here for reference:
Hi,
a few weeks ago [1], we announced that Astropy is going to hire a research software engineer. Tom A., Pay Lian, and I have reviewed the 25 applications we received from a large range of countries (India, Africa, Europe, but concentrated in the US). Applicants span a large range of experience and career paths from students to retired professors and freelance or industry software developers. I am happy to report that the two candidates we made offers to have accepted and will do work for Astropy soon. We decided to split the position over two people, because both of them are only available from December on. (But you may meet them poking around issues and PRs or the Astropy slack before then!)
It is my pleasure to introduce Clément Robert and Mridul Seth, who both wrote a short introduction:
My name is Clément, or
@neutrinoceros
in most places, including Github and Astropy's Slack. I'm French, I hold a PhD in numerical astrophysics, and I'm passionate about software development (including the boring parts !). I've been a volunteer maintainer of the yt library and its galaxy of supporting packages since 2019. When I'm away-from-keyboard, you're most likely to find me in my local movie theatre in Grenoble.
Hello everyone! Super excited to start helping around with Astropy development! I started my journey in the Scientific Python world back in 2015 as a Google Summer of Code student during my undergrad and well I have kind of just stuck around. Currently I work on the NetworkX project funded through a CZI grant! Before that I used to work at GESIS, Germany doing Jupyter things. In a previous life I dabbled a bit in academic network science research too. Feel free to ping me if you would like to have a chat :)
github: github.com/mriduls/ astropy-slack: Mridul Seth
This is the first time Astropy pays people from Astropy's own grants (here: the Moore grant) in this form, so this is somewhat of an experiment. I get paid by Astropy (a few hours/week as a sub-grant to MIT) to help onboard Clement and Mridul, get them to know our community, and guide them as they get to know Astropy. I will also do as much as I can in my expertise to review their PRs, to avoid a situation where paying someone else places an additional burden on our volunteer maintainers. However, all of us appreciate your help and input and, since both Mridul and Clement are more experienced in many parts of development than I am, I won't be able to review their PRs alone!
Clement's and Mridul's main role will be to fix issues that have long been open and to implement items on the Astropy roadmap [2] that we don't have sufficient resources to implement otherwise. Both Mridul and Clement have great experience in CI, testing, and benchmarking, so they will address items like "Implement robust performance benchmark reporting". They are both happy to help in other places, but triaging issues or hand-holding for new contributors is not the focus of their official job description.
They are funded December 2023-March 2024, for 20-30 / week each, so I hope we will make tangible progress, but we won't magically cut the number of open issues in half!
If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to them or to me and I'll do my best to address any problems.
Yours, Moritz
[1] https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/astropy-dev/c/dw_ej0dqLgQ
[2] https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/blob/main/roadmap/roadmap.md
hamogu
commented
6 months ago For the record: The original proposal asked to fund me through a sub-grant to MIT. I would have used that time to make sure that the two new contractors integrate well with the community, to on-board them, and to help review their PRs to reduce the extra work for volunteer maintainers. That funding to MIT has not happened yet and since this project ends in ~6 weeks, even if the funding were to come through tomorrow, it will be too late to support the work I intended to do. The reasons are somewhat bureaucratic (since I'm just a staff researcher at MIT and not faculty, MIT refuses sub-grants that do not provide the level of overhead that MIT wants. That means a sub-grant to me cannot be paid for from Moore funds, only NASA and NASA needs to approve this change of funds upon request from NumFOCUS, which is in the works, but takes a while).
I've tried to do the things I promised to do as a volunteer, e.g. I'm in a regular contact with the two contractors about where to focus their efforts, but when this project is over and we judge if this model (paid, outside contractors guided part-time by an established astropy maintainer) was successful, we need to take into account that I spent less time and effort on "managing" the two hires than originally intended.
neutrinoceros
commented
6 months ago Invoice from Jan 1st 2024 for the month of December 2023
neutrinoceros
commented
6 months ago Invoice from Feb 1st 2024 for the month of January 2024
MridulS
commented
6 months ago Invoice for Dec 2023 and Jan 2024
neutrinoceros
commented
6 months ago Invoice from March 1st 2024 for the month of February 2024
neutrinoceros
commented
5 months ago Invoice from March 28th 2024 for the month of March 2024
This issue is for tracking the cycle 3 project "Research Software Engineer: User and Developer Support". FR is in https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/pull/277, and details of the proposal are at https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/blob/main/finance/proposal-calls/cycle3/user-dev-support-rse.md . Budget is $98,155.29, $75,000 funded from the Moore grant (please submit invoices here) and the remainder from the NASA grant (please submit invoices here).