Introduction

Hey folks! In this blog post, I write about my two first weeks after getting accepted into GSoC.

First Meeting

The community bonding phase is the first part of the program for student to get to know the mentors (Levi Wolf, James Gaboardi, and Qunshan Zhao) and the community that will be part of. In the first week, I had the first meeting and it was just to introduce ourselves, discuss topics about the project. Furthermore, my mentors point me to some chapters of books [1] [2] [3] to read about the facility’s location and get familiarize with the problems. 

Dev Meeting

Each first Friday of the month, the community has a dev meeting to discuss the project progress. Besides that, at the dev meeting the co-founder of PySAL talk about how they release the packages and the management of the versions. This meeting was attended by about 12-14 people and the other 2 GSoC students. Their projects are about ESDA enhancements: Distortion Index and Competing destination for Spatial Interaction models, SpInt/PySal. 

Set my dev environment

This time, I spend some time setting my dev environment and navigating through the code to know the interfaces, how to test the code, practices that I should follow, and so on.

Studies

I get back to studies when I got accepted and started to read [2] and write notes in notion, but after the first meeting, I stopped reading this book and start reading the [1] on chapters selected by the mentors, (3, 9, 11). Reading [1], I felt more confident that I was understanding what I was reading and I recommend it to others students that feel like studying facility location or even GIS science. I think this book introduces the subject without an overwhelming math way and it’s a fluent reading. After reading these 3 chapters I read [4] about the P-center problem that aims to minimize the maximum response time of the demand.

Plans for the Next Week

The next week, it’s the beginning of the coding phase and I will have the second meeting. Besides that, I should code one of the models to start writing tests. 

[1] Business Site Selection, Location Analysis, and Gis - Ronald L. Church, Alan T. Murray

[2] Network and Discrete Location Models, Algorithms, and Applications - Mark S. Daskin

[3] Location Covering Models - History, Applications, and Advancements - Ronald L. Church, Alan T. Murray

[4] Calik H., Labbé M., Yaman H. (2015) p-Center Problems. In: Laporte G., Nickel S., Saldanha da Gama F. (eds) Location Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13111-5_4