NumFOCUS is a public charity in the United States that supports and promotes world-class, innovative, open source scientific software (specially the scientific Python stack, Julia and rOpenSci).
This is the first time that NumFOCUS participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) although many of the projects that NumFOCUS support participated in many previous editions as mentoring organizations or under the umbrella of one mentoring organization (for example the Python Software Foundation).
The students working with us completed three projects and we are grateful for their incredible work, the many hours that their mentors spent during the summer and the amazing people that helped us with the GSoC application.
DyND is a C++ library for dynamic, multidimensional arrays. The motivation for this project was to make DyND available for the Python scientific stack, that uses Cython extensively, without having to go through the trouble of manually looping through each portion of an array.
If you have ever use Cython you know that this was not a easy project to develop. We are happy that Ian completed the project even though he spent many hours hunting for bugs and reorganizing code (something that he did not expect).
Read more about it at Ian's post.
The Software Carpentry Foundation (SCF) is a non-profit volunteer organization whose members teach researchers basic software skills. SCF started to run over a hundred workshops worldwide a year and managing the workshops became a problem.
During the summer, Piotr worked to enhance AMY, a Django application that manages SCF's workshops, adding many new features, fixing bugs and helping SCF's program coordinators to keep updated with all the changes in AMY.
The option to create yet another tool from the scratch instead of use a CRM solution like CiviCRM was based on the fact that (1) most of the SCF members have some knowledge of Python so they could help maintain AMY in the long run and (2) an small Django application could fit better for others organizations running software training like PyLadies and Django Girls.
Read more about it at Piotr's post.
Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. In the last few years Julia got many third party libraries, which integrate external libraries or use native implementations in Julia. One of those efforts is JuliaQuantum, which aims to provide tools and frameworks for dealing with problems from quantum mechanics and quantum information science.
During the summer Amit worked on a framework for solving dynamical equations for JuliaQuantum. He integrated several solvers like the Quantum Monte-Carlo Wave Function Method. The new interface makes it easy to add new solvers and to test different methods for a given problem.
Read more about it at Amit's post.