Become a sponsor to Andrea Zonca
I'm trying to find another way to fund open-source scientific software maintenance for Cosmology.
There are 2 kinds of scientific software:
- paper-producing software is the core activity of scientific software developers, they do science through software, publish it as part of the scientific publication process
- foundational software is instead mostly about maintaining mature packages that do low-level operations, like reading/writing data, visualization.
Foundational software is rarely funded, it often is a burden for scientific software developers that detract effort from the development of paper-producing software, for which they are instead funded.
I have been the lead maintainer of the healpy
since 2010, it is a Python package which handles reading, writing, analyzing and visualizing maps of the sky in a specific pixelization scheme, extensively used in Cosmic Microwave Background analysis. It is a low-level tool that is never specifically funded, so I take time off developing software I am funded for to maintain this package.
We recently applied to a NASA grant specifically targeted at software, we got "very good" reviews, but we were not funded. Grants are better for larger projects or for one-off large rewrites, here I am targeting long-term sustainability of the package.
So if your institution has a bit of funding that can be used for software, please support my work!
I plan to use the funding to add extra hours to my work week that I can use exclusively to support healpy
, in particular there is a large refactoring in sight with breaking changes to the API toward the release of healpy 3
, I'll also continue to answer questions on Stackoverflow and write tutorials.
For more details checkout my blog post
For questions contact me on Twitter, or email code
on the domain andreazonca.com
.
Ideally I would like to have funding to work about 1 hour / week extra on healpy. I already log my work on all my projects at the University of California San Diego. In case I get any funding through Github Sponsors, I'll use them to sustain additional hours that I can spend exclusively on developing, maintaining, providing support and writing tutorials for healpy.
Featured work
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healpy/healpy
Python healpix maps tools
Python 252