GSoC Student Interview spotlight: InterMine Python Client + Nupur Gunwant

This is our blog series interviewing our 2018 Google Summer of Code students, who working remotely for InterMine for 3 months on a variety of projects. We’ve interviewed Nupur Gunwant, who will be working on the InterMine Python Client.

Hi Nupur! We’re really excited to have you on board as part of the team this summer. Can you introduce yourself?

I am Nupur Gunwant, a student from IIT Kharagpur, India. I am pursuing an Integrated Masters degree in Mathematics and Computing. I am an open source enthusiast and a maths lover. I love to solve problems and talk about ideas. I firmly believe in the power of Python and admire its versatility.

Apart from that, I am a lover of art. I want to further pursue my studies in the intersection of my artistic and technical interests. And most importantly, I always carry a book wherever I am.

What interested you about GSoC with InterMine?

I was deeply intrigued by the work InterMine does and as a student, I wanted to work with an organization with such a huge impact on the society. Another thing that motivated me towards preparing hard to work with InterMine as a student developer was the fact that it’s such a healthy and friendly community, where ideas are appreciated and one is always motivated to work on them. I think that made InterMine the most desired place to work with.

Tell us about the project you’re planning to do for InterMine this summer.

I will be working on adding functionalities to Python Client, a very important part of InterMine at present. I will begin with creating a link between the InterMine Registry and Python Client, so that the user can make use of the Registry features on the terminal.

Further I will build a Query Manager that will be a key source to perform operations on user queries using the terminal and lastly, I will add visuality to the Python Client using matplotlib.

Are there any challenges you anticipate for your project? How do you plan to overcome them?

The biggest challenge to meet all the needs of the user for the Client in all the three subparts of my project. I am planning to make community interactions and their feedback the greatest source of review on my work, which because of the communities’ experience in user experience should help a great deal in overcoming this problem.

Share a meme or gif that represents your project

InterMine community roundup: June 2017

Here are some of the exciting things that have been happening in the InterMine community recently:

• InterMineR: GSoC student Konstantinos has been updating our R client, InterMineR, which is now ready for early testing and feedback. Download and install via dev tools!
• Similarity Project: Samyadeep’s GSoC work identifying similarities between objects in InterMine has produced an intriguing early graph: https://github.com/intermine/similarity/blob/master/intermine.pdf (also, who knew pdfs could be animated?)
• InterMine iOS app: Everyone who added their name to our iOS testing sign-up form should have gotten an email from GSoC student Nadia telling you to sign up to Hockey, the third-party application we’re using to distribute test builds. After you install Hockey and add your device ID, you’ll get an email notifying you when there’s a new test build available. You can submit any feedback via Hockey, or create a ticket in the repo. (github repo)
• InterMine Registry: Leonardo’s GSoC project has an early endpoint up that can be examined – check it out here: https://intermine-registry.herokuapp.com/registry/api-docs/ – how did we manage without a registry for so long? 😅  (github repo)
• Neo4j: GSoC student Yash Sharma has shared a nice blog post about structuring InterMine metadata in Neo4j. (InterMine neo4j github repo)
• Python cookbook: Like we mentioned in a previous post, Samarth has been creating a set of InterMine python tutorials. Tutorial 3 on filtering and constraints has just been published.
• Fly correlation webapp: Basheer set up this Fly correlation webapp which takes a Drosophila gene and retrieves a list of correlated genes based on gene properties. (github repo)

Thanks to everyone who has contributed including students and their mentors. You guys are awesome!

excited Kermit via GIPHY

Have you done anything exciting with InterMine lately? email info [at] intermine [dot] org, tweet us at @intermineorg, or pop into chat.intermine.org to tell us about it… we’d love to feature you in a future round-up!