🌟 Things Are Getting Interesting!!

Hey everyone!

If you’ve read my first blog, you already know how this journey started — with nervous excitement, inspiring mentors, and my deep love for astronomy. Since then, things have only gotten more interesting — and yes, more challenging, but in the best way possible!

Developing, Debugging, and Growing

These past few weeks have felt like a whirlwind of beauty. I’ve found myself diving deeper into spectral analysis, implementing windowing techniques, exploring real research articles, and most excitingly, contributing to the actual development of functions inside Stingray.jl!

A New Adventure: EventList and GTI Handling

Now comes the exciting part — I’ve been working on mission support, PR #49, where I got to play around with EventList structures.

I made a minimal version  EventList that could read test files, handle metadata smartly, and even filter events using GTIs (Good Time Intervals). My mentor @fergus and I created a  filter_time! function that makes it super easy to slice time windows and work with just the needed data.

It felt awesome to write something like this:

julia
filter_energy!(<(10u"keV"), filter_time!(>(min_time * u"s"), event_list))

Elegant, right?

Also, a quick lesson: GTIs are just two columns — START and STOP — telling us when the telescope was actually collecting good data. Handling them properly means our analysis gets cleaner, smarter, and more accurate. I plan to extend my implementation soon to include full GTI support in EventList directly. Small step, big improvement!

Tests, Tests, and More Tests

One cool thing I picked up from looking at simpler implementations was writing smaller, more flexible test cases. I’ve started structuring my tests to be interactive and IDE-friendly — so I can quickly check and fix stuff without wrapping everything in big test blocks. It makes debugging way less stressful. suggested by @fergus

What's Next?

Right now, I’m:

• Tweaking the recipbase functions to make them more modular.

• Exploring how to use metadata more flexibly in different missions.

• Working on improving event filtering and data handling inside EventList.

• Thinking about ways to contribute test utilities that let us simulate dummy FITS files and test logic without needing real data every time.

✨ Final Thoughts

Honestly, it still feels surreal to be working with real tools and contributing code that could one day help researchers uncover deeper insights about the universe. Every commit I make, every tiny improvement I push, and even the bugs I chase down — they’re all helping me grow. Not just as a coder, but as a thinker, a problem solver, and someone who genuinely enjoys the process of learning.

What started as an exciting journey has now become something even more thrilling — it feels like I’m leveling up with each challenge I face (yes, just like in my favorite anime, Solo Leveling 😄). And the best part? This is only the beginning.